Readinds in Philosophy 2

Looking at Philosophy:
The Unbearable Heaviness of

Philosophy Made Lighter,
Fourth Edition
Donald Palmer
McGraw-Hill
Looking at Philosophy
The Unbearable Heaviness of
Philosophy Made Lighter
FOURTH EDITION
Donald Palmer
Professor Emeritus at College of Marin
For Katarina & Christian
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Looking at philosophy : the unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter / David
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1. Philosophy—History. 2. Philosophy—History—Caricatures and cartoons.
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Preface
Wittgenstein once said that a whole philosophy book could be written

consisting of nothing but jokes. This is not that book, nor does this
book treat the history of philosophy as a joke. This book takes philos-
ophy seriously, but not gravely. As the subtitle indicates, the goal of
the book is to lighten the load a bit. How to do this without simply
throwing the cargo overboard? First, by presenting an overview of
Western philosophy from the sixth century B.C.E. through most of the
twentieth century in a way that introduces the central philosophical
ideas of the West and their evolution in a concise, readable format
without trivializing them, but at the same time, without pretending
to have exhausted them nor to have plumbed their depths. Second,
following a time-honored medieval tradition, by illuminating the mar-
gins of the text. Some of these illuminations, namely those that
attempt to schematize difficult ideas, I hope will be literally illuminat-
ing. Most of them, however, are simply attempts in a lighter vein to
interrupt the natural propensity of the philosophers to succumb to
the pull of gravity. (Nietzsche said that only the grave lay in that
direction.) But even these philosophical jokes, I hope, have a pedagog-
ical function. They should serve to help the reader retain the ideas
that are thereby gently mocked. Thirty years of teaching the subject,
which I love—and which has provoked more than a few laughs on the
part of my students—convinces me that this technique should work.
iii
I do not claim to have achieved Nietzsche’s “joyful wisdom,” but I
agree with him that there is such a thing and that we should strive
for it.
Before turning you over to Thales and his metaphysical water
(the first truly heavy water), I want to say a word about the women
and their absence. Why are there so few women in a book of this
nature? There are a number of possible explanations, including these:
1. Women really are deficient in the capacity for sublimation
and hence are incapable of participating in higher culture
(as Schopenhauer and Freud suggested).
2. Women have in fact contributed greatly to the history of
philosophy, but their contributions have been denied or sup-
pressed by the chauvinistic male writers of the histories of
philosophy.
3. Women have been (intentionally or unintentionally) system-
atically eliminated from the history of philosophy by political,
social, religious, and psychological manipulations of power by
a deeply entrenched, jealous, and fearful patriarchy.
I am certain that the first thesis does not merit our serious
attention. I think there is some truth to the second thesis, and I may
be partially guilty of suppressing that truth. For example, the names
of at least seventy women philosophers in the late classical period
alone have been recorded, foremost of which are Aspasia, Diotima,
Aretê, and Hypatia. (Hypatia has been belatedly honored by having a
journal of feminist philosophy named after her.) Jumping over cen-
turies to our own age, we find a number of well-known women con-
tributing to the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth
century, including Simone de Beauvoir, Susanne Langer, and L. Susan
Stebbing.
However, no matter how original, deep, and thought-provoking
were the ideas of these philosophers, I believe that, for a number of
reasons (those reasons given in the second and third theses are
probably most pertinent here), none of them has been as historically
significant as the ideas of those philosophers who are discussed in
this book. Fortunately, things have begun to change in the past few
iv ◆ Preface
years. An adequate account of contemporary philosophy could not in
good faith ignore the major contributions to the analytic tradition of
philosophers Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, G. E. M. Anscombe, and
Judith Jarvis Thompson, nor those contributions to the Continental
tradition made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Monique Wittig, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Furthermore, a new wave of women phi-
losophers is already beginning to have considerable impact on the
content of contemporary philosophy and not merely on its style.
So, despite the risks, I defend the third thesis. I truly believe
that if women had not been systematically excluded from major par-
ticipation in the history of philosophy,1 that history would be even
richer, deeper, more compassionate, and more interesting (not to
mention more joyful) than it already is. It is not for nothing that the
book ends with a discussion of the work of a contemporary woman
philosopher and with a question posed to philosophy herself, “Quo
vadis?”—Whither goest thou?
The fourth edition proceeds with the refinement of presentation
begun in the second edition and with the addition of new material ini-
tiated in the third edition. I have had some help with all four editions
of this book. For suggestions with the earlier editions, I am grateful
to Timothy R. Allan, Trocaire College; Dasiea Cavers-Huff, Riverside
Community College; Job Clement, Daytona Beach Community College;
Will Griffis, Maui Community College; Julianna Scott Fein, Mayfield
Publishing Company; Hans Hansen, Wayne State University; Fred E.
Heifner Jr., Cumberland University; Joseph Huster, University of Utah;
Ken King, Mayfield Publishing Company; Robin Mouat, Mayfield Pub-
lishing Company; Don Porter, College of San Mateo; Brian Schroeder,
Siena College; Matt Schulte, Montgomery College; Yukio Shirahama,
San Antonio College; Samuel Thorpe, Oral Roberts University; William
Tinsley, Foothill College; James Tuttle, John Carroll University; Kerry
Walk, Princeton University; Stevens F. Wandmacher, University of
Michigan, Flint; Andrew Ward, San Jose State University; and Robert
White, Montgomery College. I would also like to thank my colleague
David Auerbach at North Carolina State University for having read
Preface ◆ v
and commented on parts of the manuscript. Jim Bull, my editor at
Mayfield Publishing Company for the first two editions, had faith in
this project from its inception. For excellent suggestions concerning
this fourth edition I thank Robert Caputi, Trocaire College; Janine
Jones, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Amber L. Katherine,
Santa Monica College; James Lemke, Coker College; and Kirby Olson,
SUNY Delhi. For the new edition, my editor at McGraw-Hill has been
Jon-David Hague. My editorial coordinator, Allison Rona, has been
exceptionally helpful. Also at McGraw-Hill I am indebted to Leslie
LaDow, the production editor, and copyeditor Karen Dorman. My wife,
Leila May, has been my most acute critic and my greatest source of
inspiration. She kept me laughing during the dreariest stages of the
production of the manuscript, often finding on its pages jokes that
weren’t meant to be there. I hope she managed to catch most of
them. There probably are still a few pages that are funnier than I
intended them to be.
Notes
1. See Mary Warnock, ed. Women Philosophers (London: J. M. Dent, 1996).
vi ◆ Preface
Contents
Preface iii
Introduction 1
I. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Sixth and Fifth Centuries B.C.E. 10
Thales 13
Anaximander 16
Anaximenes 22
Pythagoras 24
Heraclitus 27
Parmenides 31
Zeno 33
Empedocles 36
Anaxagoras 38
Leucippus and Democritus 41
II. The Athenian Period

Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. 48
The Sophists 48
Protagoras 49
Gorgias 50
Thrasymachus 51
Callicles and Critias 52
Socrates 54
Plato 59
Aristotle 72
vii
III. The Hellenistic and Roman Periods
Fourth Century B.C.E. through Fourth Century C.E. 91
Epicureanism 91
Stoicism 95
Neoplatonism 100
IV. Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

Fifth through Fifteenth Centuries 104
Saint Augustine 108
The Encyclopediasts 113
John Scotus Eriugena 115
Saint Anselm 118
Muslim and Jewish Philosophies 121
Averroës 123
Maimonides 124
The Problem of Faith and Reason 126
The Problem of the Universals 127
Saint Thomas Aquinas 130
William of Ockham 142
Renaissance Philosophers 146
V. Continental Rationalism
and British Empiricism
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 154
Descartes 154
Hobbes 173
Spinoza 177
Leibniz 182
Locke 188
Berkeley 196
Hume 201
Kant 210
VI. Post-Kantian British

and Continental Philosophy
The Nineteenth Century 227
Hegel 227
Schopenhauer 237
viii ◆ Contents
Kierkegaard 246
Marx 258
Nietzsche 271
Utilitarianism 280
Bentham 280
Mill 285
Frege 288
VII. Pragmatism, the Analytic Tradition,

and the Phenomenological Tradition
and Its Aftermath
The Twentieth Century 299
Pragmatism 299
James 300
Dewey 307
The Analytic Tradition 312
Moore 313
Russell 318
Logical Positivism 325
Wittgenstein 331
Quine 343
The Phenomenological Tradition and Its Aftermath 353
Husserl 353
Heidegger 357
Sartre 366
Structuralism and Poststructuralism 380
Saussure 380
Lévi-Strauss 383
Lacan 388
Derrida 394
Irigaray 398
Glossary of Philosophical Terms 407

Selected Bibliography 423
Index 433
Contents ◆ ix
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6
Post-Kantian British and
Continental Philosophy
The Nineteenth Century
If Kant believed that his “critical philosophy” would spell the end of
speculative metaphysics, he was sorely mistaken. Even during his life-
time, there was emerging a generation of metaphysicians, some of
whom, ironically, were using Kantian principles to advance their specu-
lations well beyond the limits that Kant lay down in his Critique. Kant
was especially embarrassed by the use of his ideas and terminology
by philosophers who were calling themselves Kantians while creating a
kind of highly metaphysical idealism of the type Kant had repudiated.
But it must be said that he himself was somewhat responsible for
this turn of events. After all, he had defined nonhuman reality as a
noumenal thing-in-itself and then announced that it was inaccessible
to human thought, with the consequence that human thought had
access only to itself. As that earlier idealist George Berkeley would
have pointed out, an inaccessible noumenal world is hardly better than
no noumenal world at all. Indeed, this new generation of German phi-
losophers derived their idealism from their dissatisfaction with Kant’s
claim that there existed a nonmental world that was unknowable.
Hegel
Primary among the ranks of the German idealists were Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
(1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).
227
Of these, it was Hegel who achieved
the greatest prominence, and it will
be he who will represent German
idealism for us.
Kant had argued that the
appearances of ultimate reality
are processed by the human mind,
which thereby creates a world for
us humans to inhabit. Hegel went
further and claimed that the mind
did not merely structure
and regulate reality but actu-
G. W. F. Hegel
ally generated it and consti-
tuted it. That is to say, reality is simply mind or spirit
(Geist in German). This claim left Hegel with a philosophy
that he himself called “absolute idealism.” It is absolute
idealism not only in the sense that absolutely nothing
but ideas exists, but also because ultimately Hegel
equated “mind” with “divine mind,” or “absolute
mind.” This meant that if mind = reality, then
reality = God. This view, in some ways similar to
Spinoza’s, brought Hegel close to pantheism.
Furthermore, besides equating Geist with real-
ity and God, Hegel also equated it with history.
Kant had seen the mind as structurally iden-
tical from individual to individual, culture to
culture, and historical period to historical
period. Hegel criticized Kant’s view as static
and ahistorical. According to Hegel, even
though the mind does have a universal,
abstract structure, its content changes
evolutionarily from period to period. There
exists a mode of philosophical introspec-
tion that reveals the general structure of
228 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

Mind and even allows us to reconstruct history in an a priori manner.
In our attempt as philosophers to investigate the nature of the mind,
we can reconstruct the logical (not chronological) beginnings of
creation. They go something like this:
In the beginning, God, pure Mind, and hence Pure Being, at-
tempted to think himself. But the thought of pure Being is an im-
possible thought; therefore, when God attempted to think Being,
he thought nothing. That is, he thought the opposite of Being.
But remember, in the unusual system being suggested here,

God is God’s thought; therefore, in his failure to think pure Being,
God has distanced himself from his own essence. This is what Hegel
calls God’s self-alienation. The “truth” of Hegel’s insight can be seen
in biblical symbolism in the relation between God and Satan. Satan is
a fallen angel. He has “fallen away” from divinity. He is, in Hegel’s way
Hegel ◆ 229
of thinking, divinity self-alienated. Another biblical indication of Hegel’s
“truth” can be seen in God’s answer to Moses when God spoke to him
through the burning bush. When the shrub burst into flame, Moses
asked it, “Who art thou?” and God answered, “I am that which is”
(or, in ungrammatical Hebrew, “I am that what am”). Here we see
that God cannot say himself without dividing his essence into a
subject-object relationship. (“I am . . .” [= subject] “that
which is” [= object]. If the subject is the object, then it is not itself
as subject.) Hegel’s God, then, is in a
kind of identity crisis. But if God
experiences an identity crisis, so
does the human because the
human mind is nothing but a
manifestation of the Divine
Mind. The history of an indi-
vidual’s mind, like history
itself, is the process of self-
awareness and self-recovery.
Returning to the di-
chotomy Being ↔ Noth-
ingness—can there be any
reconciliation between the
two? Well, these two impos-
sible thoughts (neither Pure
Being nor Pure Nothingness
can truly be thought) represent the absolute limitation of all thinking
and all reality. That is, all thought and all reality must fall somewhere
between these two extremes. Hegel’s term for anything occurring
between these polar opposites is “Becoming.” So we can call Being a
thesis (positive, +), Nothingness an antithesis (negative, – ), and
Becoming a synthesis (combination of positive and negative +/ – ).
Hegel calls this universal structure of all thought and reality the
dialectic.

Therefore, anything in the world—a table, for instance—is in
fact a process synthesizing a positivity and a negativity. It is the
table by not being the chair or the floor. This process is the nature of
thought, language, and reality, which are systems of positivities cre-
ated by negativities, and vice versa. Every thought, word, and thing
exists only as a part of a system of exclusions. Again, a thing is what
it is by not being its other, yet that “otherness” is what defines it as
a being. This fact now explains why the thoughts
of Pure Being and Pure Nothingness are impos-
sible. Thought and language only function in
a system of contrasts, yet Pure Being
encompasses all; hence, there is
nothing to contrast with it, except
Nothingness, which is nothing.
(Are you following this dizzy-
ing “logic”?) Furthermore, it
can be deduced from this
system that every syn-
thesis must become a
new thesis, and defined
as it is by its opposite,
this new thesis must
spawn its own antithe-
sis. So history is an
Hegel ◆ 231
eternal process of the dialectic, with each historical moment being a
concatenation of contradictions—the tension between the positive
and the negative. These forces are opposed to each other, yet mutu-
ally dependent on each other. Eventually, the tension between the
thesis and the antithesis destroys the historical moment, but out
of its ashes a new historical moment is born, one that brings forward
the best of the old moment. Here is Hegel’s optimism: progress is
built into history. And if we individuals think we see regression and
backsliding at specific times in history, this is because we are blind to
“the cunning of Reason,” which uses apparent retrograde movements
to make hidden progress. Such is the nature of Reason’s (i.e., God’s)
process of self-recovery. Consider, for example, the period of Graeco-
Roman democracy. On the one hand, there existed among the Greek
and Roman democrats the commitment to self-determination, free-
dom, and human dignity (as seen, e.g., in Pericles’ “funeral speech”).
On the other hand, during their democratic periods, both Greece and
Rome were imperialistic, slave-holding states. These two essential
features of the society in question were contradictory but, ironically,
were mutually dependent on each another. The slaves existed for the
pleasure of the new democratic class, but without slavery and the
booty from plundering, there never would have been a class of men
liberated from toil who could dedicate their time, skills, and intellect
to the creation of a democratic state. Yet eventually the conceptual
contradiction between freedom and unfreedom, the two pillars of
Graeco-Roman democracy, tore the society apart and prepared the
way for a new kind of society, medieval feudalism.
Now, feudalism might not seem to you and me like a progression
over earlier democratic societies, and in fact, it might seem like a ret-
rogression. But from Hegel’s point of view, medieval society represents
an advance in freedom over Greece and Rome because in feudalism
there were no slaves. Even the most humble serf had legal rights.
What happened in history also happens individually. Each of us
passes through various stages in our conceptions of our self and our

ALL MEN
ARE FREE! Me? Well, not ALL
men are men
Me too? after all . . .
Well, not
ALL
men . . .
freedom. There is the stage at which we believe we can be free only by

escaping the domination of others and by dominating them. Then we
come to realize that in dominating them
we ourselves are dominated because
we become dependent on those
we dominate, both materi-
ally and in terms of self-
identity. (Who am I? I am the
lord. But only as long as I
am recognized as such by
the bondsman. Without his
recognition, I am nobody.
Hence, in effect, he is the
lord, and I am the bonds-
man.) Only by acknowledging
that neither we nor others
around us are free can we
Hegel ◆ 233
transcend the unfreedom of relationships of domination and discover
higher forms of freedom—which is to say, discover the path of Rea-
son and Divinity.
This sample of Hegelian thinking gives us an inkling of the psy-
chological, sociological, historical, and theological dimensions of
Hegel’s thought. What we miss in this sampling is the absolute sys-
tematization of his philosophy. An outline of one of his several pro-
posals for such a system follows:
The System
I. The idea-in-itself (= logic)
A. Being This we’ve just
B. Nothingness discussed.
C. Becoming
II. The idea-outside-itself (= nature, i.e., the material world qua
material that is the opposite of spirit but must be poten-
tially spirit. The goal of inanimate matter is spirit.)
III. The idea for itself (= spirit; the idea recovered from its loss
into its opposite.)
A. Subjective spirit (Mind as self-conscious and introverted.)
B. Objective spirit (Mind projecting its own laws outward,
creating a human world.)
1. Law (Exterior—comes to the individual from without.)
2. Morality (Interior—comes from within the individual.)
3. Ethics (Synthesis of the law exteriorized and
interiorized.)
a. Family
b. Society
c. State
C. Absolute spirit
1. Art
2. Religion
3. Philosophy
Notice that this whole system is structured in terms of inter-
relating triads of theses-antitheses-syntheses (even though Hegel
rarely used those terms) and that the state is the highest form of
objective spirit. Many of Hegel’s critics point this out when they call
attention to his eventual worship of the authoritarian, repressive
Prussian state. Some even claim his whole system was contrived to
be in the political service of the newly restored Prussian monarch,
Hegel’s paymaster.1
A more positive interpretation of Hegel’s objective spirit concen-
trates on his designation of Napoleon as a sign of the end of history.2
On this account, history is the history of the opposition between mas-
ters and slaves, or lords and bondsmen. The labor of the bondsmen
had created a world of culture that transcended nature. Before the
French Revolution the fruit of their labor was enjoyed only by the lords,
who had finally proven themselves to be useless. The rise of Napoleon
marked the end of the reign of the lords and the advent of a new uni-
versal and homogeneous state in which lords no longer looked down
Hegel ◆ 235
contemptuously on bondsmen; rather, this new state was one in which
“one consciousness recognizes itself in another, and in which each
knows that reciprocal recognition”; 3 that is, each person will recognize
all other people’s individuality in their universality and their universality
in their individuality. Napoleon’s cannons at the Battle of Jena, which
Hegel could hear as he hurried through the last pages of his Phenome-
nology of Mind, were finishing off the old world of masters and slaves.
Napoleon himself was the harbinger of the posthistorical world. Yet to
Hegel it was no surprise that people caught up in the turbulent events
of the moment did not grasp their significance at the time. The end of
history cannot be understood by those in history. This is the meaning
of Hegel’s aphorism “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the
falling of dusk.”4 But perhaps in Hegel’s mind his own philosophy repre-
sented the posthistorical world even more than did Napoleon. It also
must be noted that it is not objective spirit that is the apogee of
Hegel’s system; rather, it is absolute spirit, and the highest pinnacle
of absolute spirit is not the state but philosophy (and, one assumes,
particularly Hegel’s philosophy).
The Owl of Minerva

Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was one of Hegel’s sharpest
critics. He was a younger contemporary who refused to be intimi-
dated by Hegel’s immense fame. As a beginning philosophy teacher at
the University of Berlin, Schopenhauer had scheduled classes at the
same time as Hegel’s, knowing full well
that thereby he was guaranteeing for
himself few, if any, students. This arro-
gant young philosopher’s opinion of
Hegel was one of undisguised con-
tempt, as can be seen in the following
unflattering portrait he drew.
Hegel, installed from above by the
powers that be as the certified
Great Philosopher, was a flat-
headed, insipid, nauseating, illiter-
ate charlatan, who reached the
pinnacle of audacity in scribbling
together and dishing up the
craziest mystifying nonsense.5
Schopenhauer, in fact, showed deep respect for only two West-

ern philosophers: Plato and Kant. He also admired the philosophical
traditions of India. To Schopenhauer, the rest of the philosophers
throughout history had been merely “windbags.” Schopenhauer began
his work demanding a return to Kant, and indeed, the first part of
Schopenhauer’s main work,The World as Will and Idea, was fundamen-
tally a repetition of Kantian ideas. He agreed with Kant that the
human mind is incapable of knowing ultimate reality, that the only
reality we are capable of grasping intellectually is that which has
passed through the grid work of space and time and through the
categories of the understanding. Schopenhauer wrote:
“The world is my idea”:—this is a truth which holds good for every-
thing that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflec-
tive and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has
Schopenhauer ◆ 237
attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain
to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye
that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which sur-
rounds him is there only as idea.6
Now, when Kant turned to the noumenal world, he claimed that

we could not know it, though we had the right to hold various beliefs
about it based on certain of our practical needs. Recall that for
Kant, these beliefs were extremely optimistic ones: faith in God,
freedom, immortality, and eternal justice. Furthermore, Kant had
pointed out certain human experiences, certain positive intuitions
of ours, that he hoped might be extrarational hints about the nature
of that unknowable noumenal world. For example, there were those
feelings of the sublime that we experience when we look deeply into
the sky on a clear summer night, and equally inspiring to Kant were
the feelings of moral duty that we experience in certain moments
of crisis. As Kant put it, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and
increasing admiration and awe . . . the starry heavens above and the
moral law within.”7
Well, Schopenhauer too believed that there were certain intuitive
experiences that should be heeded because they might well give us an
extrarational insight into ultimate reality. But Schopenhauer’s exam-
ples of such insights were very different indeed from those of Kant.

For example, Schopenhauer wondered why it is that when some-
one is told of the death of an acquaintance, the first impulse that
person experiences is the urge to grin—an urge that, of course,
must be suppressed. And Schopenhauer wondered why it is that
a respectable businessman or government official, who may have
worked tirelessly for years to achieve the success and power that he
has finally obtained, is willing to risk all of it for a moment’s sexual
It’s Not Nice to Giggle at Funerals
pleasure with a forbidden partner. These and similar human experi-

ences left Schopenhauer with a much more pessimistic hunch about
the nature of ultimate reality than that held by Kant. Schopen-
hauer’s dark suspicions quickly became “truths” in his system. (The
curious status of these nonepistemological truths has not escaped
the eyes of Schopenhauer’s critics.) Said Schopenhauer: “This truth,
which must be very serious and impressive if not awful to everyone, is
that a man can also say and must say, ‘The world is my will.’”8
Schopenhauer Peers beyond the Curtain
of the Phenomenal World
Schopenhauer’s awful truth amounts to this: Behind appear-

ances, behind the phenomenal veil, there does lie a noumenal reality;
but far from being the benign sphere where Kant hoped to find God,
immortality, and justice, Schopenhauer found there a wild, seething,
inexorable, meaningless force that he called “will.” This force creates
all and destroys all in its insatiable demand for “More!” (More of what
it does not know—it only knows that it wants more.)
The best phenomenal images for understanding Schopenhauer’s
will are images of sex and violence. Not only in nature but even in the
human sphere, every event is an act of procreation or destruction.
Our actions, whether intentional or unintentional, motivated con-
sciously or unconsciously, are, in fact, actions that in one way or
another are in the service of procreation and destruction. (If you are

familiar with Freud’s theories, you know now
where he got his idea of the id. Even the
name “id” [Latin for “it”] indicates
the same noumenal indeter-
minacy as Schopen-
hauer’s will. Freud
himself said in 1920,
“We have unwittingly
steered our course
into the harbour
of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy.”)9
According to Scho-
penhauer, everything in the
phenomenal world is merely the manifestation of this perverse will, or
as he called it, an “objectification of the will” (that is to say, the will
passed through the categories and the grid work of space and time).
Even though Schopenhauer’s images of the will are ones of dumb
brutality, he also conceived of the will as immensely cunning. The will is
capable of disguising its heartless purposes from any of its own
“experiments” that might be capable of taking offense or even taking
reprisals against the will. In other words, the human mind is con-
structed in such a way as to be self-deceiving, even concerning its
view on the world. The will is denatured as it passes through the grid
work and the categories. Nevertheless, if we could strip away our
natural optimism, itself a product of the cunning of the will, we could
look into nature and see that it cares not a whit for the happiness
or well-being of any of its creatures beyond the bare needs of repro-
duction. Schopenhauer illustrated his point with descriptions of the
giant turtles of the South Pacific that were known to have been
smashed to death by the hundreds against the rocky coast in
storms during mating season as they tried to get to shore to lay
their eggs in the sand. Schopenhauer also called attention to that
strange species of moth that emerges from its cocoon with full
reproductive and digestive
systems; yet nature forgot
to give it one little detail—a
mouth! So the moth repro-
duces and then seeks food
but quickly starves to death.
Yet nature does not care; the
moth has laid its little eggs.
And, according to Schopen-
hauer, what’s true of the
turtle and the moth is true
of the human being. If you are
over eighteen years of age,
your body is deteriorating.
Your body, which is just the
scaffolding for the reproduc-
tive system, begins to die once it has held its eggs in place and given
them a chance to duplicate themselves.
This news is terrible indeed. Why do people not realize that we are
all in a state of bondage to the irrational, meaningless will? Precisely
because of the cunning of the will. Human culture itself is nothing but
one more experiment of the will, and human optimism and hope are
simply the will’s gift to us to guarantee that we continue to deceive
ourselves about the true state of affairs. The whole of human culture
is nothing more than a grand deception. Art, religion, law, morality,
science, and even philosophy are only sublimations of the will, subli-
mations that are still acting in its service. Hegel’s glorification of
higher culture is simply proof of the absolute triumph of the will.
All our hopes and aspirations will be dashed. Happiness is an
impossible dream. It is absurd that anyone can remain an optimist
after even a glance at the newspaper on any given day. A mudslide
swallows up whole villages. A mad assassin’s bullet strikes down the
hope of a people. A single parent, mother of three, is killed by a painful
disease. The drums of war never cease beating, and an inglorious

The Human Being in the Grip of the Will
Chat Chat Chat

Yak Yak Yak
Bla Bla Bla
What Seems to Be What Is the Case

the Case
death awaits all. Verily, only a fool can remain optimistic in the face of
the truth.
Surely philosophy was never so disheartened and disheartening
as in the case of Schopenhauer. But, according to him, his pessimism
was a rational pessimism, and he sought a rational solution to it.
There had, of course, been others who understood the truth and
sought rational responses to it. Both Jesus and the Buddha had
been pessimists, according to Schopenhauer, but their solutions were
chimerical and still in the service of the will (besides, their doctrines
were perverted by the cunning of the will manifested in the optimism
of their disciples who presented their masters’ pessimistic mes-
sages as “good news”). Plato too had offered a nearly successful
solution, but his eternal Forms were still part of the world of ideas,
hence of the will.
It might seem that suicide should be the only recommendation
that Schopenhauer’s philosophy could make. But in fact, Schopen-
hauer recommended against suicide on the grounds that self-murder
would be a last, desperate act of will, hence still a manifestation of
the will (that is to say, no act requires as much concentration of will
as does suicide; hence, suicide cannot possibly be the negation of
the will).
Do not despair! There is a Schopenhauerian solution. Even
though all culture is nothing but a sublimation of sex and violence,
hence an experiment of the will, there is a point at which the cultural
world can achieve such a degree of subtlety that it can break off from
its own unconscious origins and set up an independent sphere that
Elvis’s Solution
is, in fact, counternature and therefore antiwill. This autonomy from

the will occurs in a specific corner of the art world—that of music.
But not just any music. Certainly, popular music won’t do, evoking as
it does the imagery and emotions of the phenomenal world. Nor will
most classical music serve. For example, in Beethoven’s works, the
imagery is still too strong; hence its link to the will is too obvious.
(When listening to the “Pastoral,” we see the cows in the meadow, the
bright green grass and the wildflowers, and the puffy little white
clouds in the blue sky.) No, an escape from the will can be achieved
only in the contemplation of purely formal music, a music without
words and without imagery. There is a kind of baroque music that fits
the bill—a music of pure
mathematical for-
malism: point,
counterpoint,
point. It is possi-
ble to dedicate
one’s life to the
disinterested
contemplation
of such music,
and Schopen-
hauer recom-
mended pre-
cisely this
contemplation
as his version of
Nirvana—an escape
from the world into pure
form and hence a triumph over the will. It was this goal toward which
Plato and the Buddha were clumsily struggling.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy was deeply influential among intellec-
tuals in the German-speaking world. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann is hardly conceivable without
Schopenhauer. Yet nobody seems to have taken Schopenhauer’s solu-
tion very seriously. It was perhaps too obvious, as Nietzsche was to
point out, that baroque music is the most sensual of all music and
that the desire to immerse oneself in it is after all a desire, hence
still the work of the will.
Kierkegaard
Schopenhauer’s method of dealing with Hegel was first to call him
names and then to ignore him. But the generation of Continental

philosophers who followed
Schopenhauer had to
deal more directly with
Hegel, whose influence by
the 1830s had become
immense. One of the
most curious members of
this generation was the
Dane Søren Kierkegaard
(1813–1855). Kierke-
gaard, who is generally
recognized today as the
father of existentialism,
thought of himself pri-
marily as a religious
Søren Kierkegaard author and an anti-
philosopher. In truth, he
was not opposed to philosophy as such but to Hegel’s philosophy.
Nevertheless, like the rest of his generation, Kierkegaard fell more
under Hegel’s spell than he would have liked to admit.
Kierkegaard blamed Hegel for much of what he took to be the
dehumanization of the intellectual life of a whole generation. This
dehumanization was the result of a “correction” that Hegel made to
Aristotelian logic. Aristotle had laid down the three basic principles
of logic as
1. The principle of identity (A = A)
2. The principle of noncontradiction [not (A and not-A)]
3. The principle of the excluded middle [either (A) or (not-A)]
Hegel believed these principles to be erroneous. His new dialec-
tical logic overturned them. In the dialectic, everything is in some
sense its opposite; therefore, it is not the case that A = A because
A = not-A. (Greek democracy was in some sense equivalent to Greek
slavery; hence, it was its own opposite.) If the principle of identity
Kierkegaard ◆ 247
falls, then the principles of noncontradiction and of the excluded mid-
dle collapse too. Kierkegaard took offense at the pompousness of
Hegel’s suggestion. He mocked it with vignettes like the following:
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret
it; . . . whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh
at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will regret
that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret
both. . . . Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will also
regret that; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. . . .
Hang yourself, you will regret it, do not hang yourself, and you will also
regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret
both. . . . This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.10
What Kierkegaard writes is not really the sum and substance of

all philosophy. It is the sum and substance of Hegel’s philosophy, a
philosophy in which all oppositions are swallowed up, creating abso-
lute apathy and demoralization, and which, by abrogating the princi-
ple of the excluded middle, thereby annuls the “either/or” of decision
making—and therewith denies freedom, which, for Kierkegaard and
his existentialist followers, is the essence of human existence. There-
fore, Kierkegaard published the foregoing “ecstatic lecture” in a book
that he called Either/Or, whose very title was an attack on Hegel.
Not only had Hegel collapsed the distinction between the
“either” and the “or,” but he had also abolished the difference between
epistemology and ontology by asserting “the Rational is the Real and
the Real is the Rational,”11 which is another way of saying that exis-
tence and thought are identical. Kierkegaard inverted Hegel’s asser-
tion, claiming that existence is the one thing that cannot be thought.
This claim is a double entendre, meaning (1) Thought and existence
are not identical, and (2) it is impossible to think “existence.”
Recall that Hegel’s god had found himself incapable of thinking
pure existence (Pure Being). Kierkegaard pushed this limitation to the
fore, claiming not just that pure existence is impossible to think but
that any existence is unthinkable, because, in Kierkegaard’s Platonic
theory of meaning, thought is always a form of abstraction. Words
are signifiers that denote concepts, and concepts are general cate-
gories. Every word in the sentence “The brown dog obeys its master”
denotes for Kierkegaard an abstraction. Language abstracts from
experience and suppresses differences in order to allow the possibility
of thought and communication; hence, thought (which is language-
bound) distances us from real existence, which is never abstract but
always concrete.
Kierkegaard ◆ 249
Kierkegaard’s philoso-
phy, as opposed to the
abstractions of Hegelian
philosophy, would
return us to the
concreteness of
existence. But he
was not so much
interested in the
concreteness of
existence of things
in the world as he was
in the concreteness of
individual human exis-
tence. René Descartes
had been right to begin
philosophy with the self
(“I think, therefore I am”), but he had been wrong, as was Hegel after
him, to equate the self with thought. “To think is one thing, to exist is
another,” said Kierkegaard. I can think and say many things about
myself—“I am a teacher, I am a man, I am an American, I am in love,
I prefer chocolate to vanilla.” Yet, when I am done talking and thinking
about myself, there is one thing remaining that cannot be thought—
my existence, which is a “surd” (an irrational residue). I cannot think
it; rather, I must live it.
My lived existence, according to Kierkegaard, is equated with
passion, decision, and action. None of these categories can be
exhausted by thought. But Kierkegaard is not saying that there is no
connection between existence and thought. In fact, existence must
be interpenetrated with thought. What kind of thought? An “existen-
tial probing” that “dedicates itself more and more profoundly to the
task of existing, and with the consciousness of what existence is,
penetrates all illusions, becoming more and more concrete through
reconstructing existence in action.”12

To explain this notion I must clarify a distinction that Kierke-
gaard drew in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosoph-
ical Fragments between “objective thought” and “subjective thought.”
The first category is a kind of thinking for which there exist objective
criteria of truth, such as in the case of math, science, and history.
If you wonder whether “3 + 2 = 5,” “f = ma,” or “Caesar crossed the
Rubicon in 49 B.C.E.,” recognized standards can be used to determine
the truth of these assertions.
Objective truths exist, then, but What’s
your deepest
they are existentially indiffer- thought?
ent. That is, they have no
Caesar
essential relationship to my crossed the Rubicon
existence. If I found out in 49 B.C.E. . . .
What’s yours?
that one of them was false, Awop bop a
I might be surprised, but I loo mop a lop
bam boom
would not thereby become a
different person. Therefore,
Kierkegaard’s philoso-
phy is uninterested
in objective truths.
Subjective
thought, however, is
thought for which there
exist no objective criteria of
truth. Subjective thought exists, for
example, in the case of values, for instance, ethical and religious
claims. If I tell you that it is immoral to cause unnecessary misery to
others and if you challenge my assertion, ultimately there are no
objective standards for me to appeal to and I cannot prove my claim.
(Kantianism won’t work, according to Kierkegaard, because it presup-
poses a valuing of notions of consistency and noncontradictoriness.
But what if you refuse to accept that value?) Similarly, if I claim that
“God is love” and you challenge me, I cannot appeal to any objective
criterion of truth to justify my assertion.
Kierkegaard ◆ 251
Nevertheless, these subjective truths are essential to my exis-
tence in the way that objective truths are indifferent. We pretty
much are what we do, and what we do—the actions we perform—
is the result of decisions, which are embodiments of values chosen.
Yet those values cannot be grounded in certainty but are always
accepted on faith—a faith in the uncertain.
This need for values and decisiveness in the face of the uncer-
tainty of all things provokes, according to Kierkegaard, a kind of dizzi-
ness and loss of footing that
reveals the true human condi-
tion as one of anguish and
despair. Hegel was wrong.
The real is not the
rational. Rather, the
lived experience of true
human reality lies
underneath rational-
ity as a kind of de-
spairing nothingness
longing to be a some-
thing. (Yet, had Hegel
not said this too?)
There are other sub-
jective truths besides those Vertigo in the Face of the
of moral and religious valua- Uncertainty of Reality
tion. But these truths can
only be communicated indirectly, Kierkegaard told us. They can be
hinted at, alluded to, overstated, understated, misstated, joked
about, poeticized, or ignored. But they cannot be said —or at least,
if they are said, they can’t be directly understood. Such a truth
would be the truth of “my death.” Now, I know that all humans die and
that, being a human, someday I too will die. I know much about death
from the studies I have made in my history and biology classes. But
that knowledge does not mean that I have grasped my death as a

subjective truth. In the Postscript, Kierkegaard relates the story of
a man who meets a friend on a street corner of Copenhagen and is
invited to dinner by him. The invitee enthusiastically promises to
attend, but at that very moment the prospective guest is struck and
killed by a tile that happens to fall from the roof. Kierkegaard mocks
the dead man, saying that one could laugh oneself to death over this
case. Here is a person who makes an absolute commitment into the
future, yet whose existence is whisked away by a gust of wind. After
chuckling for a while over the irony of this story, Kierkegaard then
asks himself if he is not being too harsh on the chap. Surely we don’t
expect the guest to respond to his invitation saying, “You can count
Kierkegaard ◆ 253
on me, I shall certainly come; but I must make an exception for the
contingency that a tile happens to blow down from a roof, and kills
me; for in that case I cannot come.”13 Yet the reader of the Post-
script comes to the realization that that is exactly what Kierkegaard
wanted. When we reach the understanding that after every utterance
we make about the future, we can correctly add the rider: “However,
I may be dead in the next moment, in which case I shall not attend,”
then we will have grasped the subjective truth of our death.
The point of Kierkegaard’s story is not to provoke a sense of
morbidity. According to him, the discovery of one’s death as a sub-
jective truth becomes the pretext for another discovery—that of
“one’s existence” as a subjective truth. Only against a backdrop of
the yawning abyss of eternity can the immediacy and fragility of
I hope my
socks match.
The Individual before the Yawning Abyss of Eternity

existence be understood. Most people are oblivious to the proximity
of nothingness, and they spend their lives engaged in petty thoughts
and pointless projects. (“Do my socks have holes? What will people
think of me if I wear a soiled tie?”) But the discovery of our subjective
truths concretizes and intensifies our existence. It helps us to order
our priorities and clarify our values and to recover the self from its
alienation into social roles, material possessions, and linguistic
abstractions. It reveals (and at the same time creates) the self
that had been invisible to the self.
For Kierkegaard, the self is essentially subjectivity, and subjec-
tivity is constituted by the individual’s commitment to his or her
subjective truths. The authentic self, for Kierkegaard, is one that
“chooses itself” by a form of self-reflective activity that both clarifies
and creates values while assuming total responsibility for those
values. It was this process that Hegel had left out of his system,
according to Kierkegaard; or, more correctly, it was this process that
any system would necessarily swallow up. Therefore, Kierkegaard was
antisystematic and titled one of his books Philosophical Fragments,
yet another slap in Hegel’s face.
Kierkegaard saw as his task not the development of a new epis-
temology nor the creation of a new system of metaphysics, but the
creation of a whole new kind of human being—people who could grasp
their own freedom and create their own destiny. (In this task he was
joined by two other wayward nineteenth-century thinkers at whom we
have yet to look: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.) Kierkegaard
called his version of the new human being “a Knight of Faith.” This
person, for Kierkegaard, has an almost superhuman kind of strength
and greatness. Kierkegaard wrote of the archetypal Knight of Faith,
Not one shall be forgotten who was great in the world. But each was
great in his own way . . . each became great in proportion to his ex-
pectation. One became great by expecting the possible, another by
expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became
greater than all. Everyone shall be remembered but each was great in
proportion to the greatness of that with which he strove. For he who
Kierkegaard ◆ 255
strove with the world became great by overcoming the world, and he
who strove with himself became great by overcoming himself, but he
who strove with God became greater than all.14
These knights have grasped the absurdity and contingency of all

existence. David Hume had meditated on the disconnectedness of all
things. But Hume had only meditated on it, whereas the Knights of
Faith feel it in their bones. Yet they find the strength within them-
selves to unify their world, to hold it together with an act of will,
which Kierkegaard called “faith.” These knights are individuals who
have looked profoundly into the world of humans and seen that at
the deepest level we are alone. We are in “absolute isolation”—an
aloneness that constitutes a kind of madness, or “divine madness,”

for Kierkegaard’s heroes are alone with their god. In fact, Kierke-
gaard’s Knights of Faith, his “new humans,” are not new at all. Rather,
they are based on Kierkegaard’s tortured interpretation of the bibli-
cal patriarch Abraham, who heard a voice in the night telling him to
sacrifice his son. Abraham took full responsibility for the meaning of
the message—it was his meaning, his subjective truth—and for his
actions, thereby becoming a Kierkegaardian hero. Kierkegaard wrote

of him, “Abraham was greater than all, great by reason of his power
whose strength is impotence, great by reason of his wisdom whose
secret is foolishness, great by reason of his hope whose form is mad-
ness.”15 Hegel had transformed human existence into pure thought.
Kierkegaard counteracted Hegel’s rationalization by introducing into
philosophy a new category, “the category of the absurd,” and putting
it in the heart of his ideal human being.
Kierkegaard ◆ 257
Marx
Of course, Søren Kierkegaard was not the only philosopher of his gen-
eration to be deeply influenced by Hegel. When Karl Marx (1818–1883)
arrived as a young philosophy student at the University of Berlin in
the mid-1830s, Hegel had been dead of cholera for five years, but his
spirit still reigned supreme. To do philosophy in the Germany of the
1830s was to do Hegelian philosophy. Nevertheless, the Hegelians
were by no means in agreement as to what “doing philosophy” truly
consisted of. In fact, they had broken into two warring camps, the
Hegel’s Spirit Reigns Supreme

“Hegelian Left” and the “Hegelian Right.” The Right gave the more
orthodox reading of Hegel and was composed mostly of older, more
conservative members of their generation. They were primarily inter-
ested in what Hegel had to say about religion and morality. The Left
was composed of younger, more radical philosophers. They sometimes
called themselves the “Young Hegelians.” They were mostly interested
in developing what they took to be still inchoate Hegelian notions
about social and political issues. They believed that Hegel’s ideas as
he himself understood them were false but that there was a hidden
truth in them that needed revealing. Their attitude toward Hegel’s
writing was very much like Freud’s attitude toward dreams. There is a
“manifest content” (the dream images) and a “latent content” (the
true meaning of the dream, which can be discovered only by interpret-
ing the manifest content). Sometimes the analysis of the imagery,
like Freud’s dream analysis, demonstrates that the meaning is the
opposite of what it appears to be.
Marx ◆ 259
Needless to say, Marx fell under the influence of the Hegelian
Left, not the Right. The foremost practitioner of the art of Hegelian
Leftism was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), whose Essence of Chris-
tianity became holy scripture to a whole generation of progressive
German youth.
Feuerbach’s book, which was meant to be a kind of anthropologi-
cal analysis of religion, contained an inversion of a key Hegelian idea.
Hegel had asserted, “Man is God self-alienated.” Feuerbach reversed
this proposition, saying, “God is man self-alienated.” That is, the idea
of God is the perversion of the idea of man. Feuerbach believed that
there were certain (Platonic) universal values to which all humans
aspired. Every culture throughout history has longed for truth,
beauty, justice, strength, and purity. It is part of the human essence
to have these longings. But
as historical peoples were
frustrated in their attempts
to achieve these ideals, the
ideals themselves became
alienated from the human and
were projected onto an Ideal
Being, a God who demanded
that all be sacrificed to his
glory. Feuerbach believed that
as long as we humans contin-
ued to alienate our ideals into
some nonhuman extraneous
being, we would never be able
to achieve the fullness of our
own being. Hegel had caught
only a glimpse of the truth.
Man is God, but we can only become the god that we are by an act of
self-recovery that can be brought about exclusively by annulling our
traditional concept of religion. For example, consider the Feuerbachian
concept of the Holy Family.

According to Feuerbach, only by abolishing the image of the
heavenly family can we bring peace, happiness, and love into the
earthly family, because as long as we hold the image of the former
before us, we will consider the earth merely a place of trial and pun-
ishment. Workers will attend church on Sunday, confess their sins,
become resigned to misery as the human lot, and on the next payday
return to the tavern to drink away their meager salaries.
This is the heavenly family.

It is the idealization of the
earthly family. Here peace,
happiness, and love reign.
This is the earthly family.

The frustrated father comes
home drunk from the tavern
where he has spent much of the
pittance that is his weekly wage.
He expends his rage terrorizing
his wife and children.
Marx fell directly under Feuerbach’s influence. As a young phi-

losophy student, Marx wrote, “One cannot do philosophy without
passing through the fiery brook.” (In German, Feuerbach means “fiery
brook.”) But Marx soon became disenchanted with Feuerbach, and his
Marx ◆ 261
own philosophy began with a critique of his old mentor. Feuerbach had
prided himself on having escaped from Hegel’s idealism, proclaiming
himself a materialist. But Marx criticized Feuerbach as a crypto-
idealist, that is, an idealist who believed himself to be a materialist.
Marx pointed out the idealistic implications of Feuerbach’s account
of the heavenly family. According to it, we could bring about changes
in the material configurations of the earthly family by changing the
idea of the heavenly family. Marx, to the contrary, argued that all
change must begin at the level of material configurations. In his
“Theses on Feuerbach” he wrote, “Once the earthly family is discov-
ered to be the secret of the holy family, the
former must then itself be theoretically
criticized and radically changed in prac-
tice.” 16 Consistent with this attitude,
Marx ended his tract against Feuerbach
with the following famous line: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways: the point however is
to change it.”17 Marx believed that once
the family was revolutionized (i.e., once its
hierarchy of power was restructured,
along with the hierarchy of power in the
society of which the family was the mirror
image), then the idea of the holy family
would simply disappear. Religion would
not need to be abolished; it would simply
dissolve. This disappearance would occur
because, contrary to what Feuerbach
believed, religion is not the cause of alien-
ation; it is, rather, a symptom of alienation and sometimes even a
remonstration against it. Marx’s statement that religion is the opi-
ate of the masses is often taken out of context and misunderstood.
What he actually said is this: “Religious distress is at the same time
the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heart-
less world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the
opium of the people.”18 Here the word “opium” refers to the drug’s
power to dull pain.
Like Feuerbach and Hegel before him, Marx was interested in
analyzing alienation (the process of the subject being split from its
natural object). Although Marx discussed alienation in a number of
its manifestations (alienation from nature, social alienation, and
self-alienation), he was most philosophically original perhaps in his
account of “the alienation of labor.” Marx believed that it was the
nature of human beings to be producers. We create of necessity,
Marx thought. He preferred the designation homo faber (man the
maker) to homo sapiens (man the knower) because our knowing is
dependent on our
doing. According to
Marx, to a great
extent we are what
we make. We create
our products, and our
products re-create
us. Our minds begin
to take on the fea-
tures of the objects
we create. If we cre-
ate in piecemeal,
fragmented ways, we
become piecemeal
and fragmented ourselves. If we create useless objects, we ourselves
become useless human beings.19 Unfortunately, the processes of
production are influenced by historical forces that are not always in
our control. When these forces, usually socio-politico-economic ones,
drive a wedge between individual humans and their products, the
result is “alienated labor.” This alienation happens if the work a per-
son performs is not the expression of a natural creative need but is
Marx ◆ 263
motivated by the necessity of fulfilling other needs, such as economic
or avaricious ones. Further alienation occurs if the product that a
worker creates is for the profit of another person and if the product
enters into an economic system
meant to fulfill desires of greed
rather than true human needs.
And above all, alienated labor
comes about if the worker’s
product returns to the worker
as a disabling alien force.
(Extreme case: The worker
produces cigarettes, which
give that worker lung can-
cer.) It will come as no sur-
prise to you to hear that,
according to Marx, of all the
historical socioeconomic
systems, with the exception of
slavery, capitalism is the one
that promotes the most intense
forms of alienated labor. Alienated labor, in turn, produces self-
alienation—workers confront themselves as strangers and as
strangers to the human race. (This is Marx’s version of Hegel’s divine
identity crisis.) The goal of the young Karl Marx’s communism was
to create a society in which all alienation would be overcome and in
which humans would recover their lost essence as homo faber.
In converting Hegel’s idealism into a form of materialism (thereby
“standing Hegel on his head”), Marx created a philosophy unique in
history. We have run across materialists before, of course; Democritus
and Hobbes were such. But each of them, in claiming that ultimately
everything resolves into matter, chose to define the key category in
terms of physics. Their material reality was simply mass in motion.
But Marx chose his key category not from physics but from econom-
ics. He did not try to explain the whole of reality but only human real-

ity. Marx used an analytic
model involving a foun-
dation and a superstruc-
ture. According to him,
the foundations of the
social world are material
ones: natural resources,
means of production, and
means of distribution as
well as the human work
relations involved at this
level. Built on this founda-
tion is a level composed of
certain other social relations, such as legal and political arrange-
ments, and above this is yet another level, comprising “higher culture,”
such social features as art, religion, morality, poetry, and philosophy.

According to Marx,
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of pro-
duction which correspond to a definite stage of development of their
material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of pro-
duction constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and
to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the social, political,
Marx ◆ 265
and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness.20
In this and similar passages, Marx made the relationship be-

tween the foundation and the superstructure seem simple. Higher
culture, or what he called the “ideological” sphere, was merely a
“reflex” or a “sublimate” of the socioeconomic foundation. Later he
modified this, admitting that the ideational superstructure and the
material foundation mutually influenced each other, though ultimately
the foundation dominated. The ideational features of society never
ceased to be ideology, that is, a system of unconscious propaganda
for the foundational economic structure in which the contradictions

in that structure are disguised or denied. Therefore, to find out the
true status of the symbols in a society, you simply ask, “Who owns
the foundation?” Find out who controls the natural resources, the
means of production, and the means of distribution (the raw materi-
als, the factories, the trucking lines, and the distribution outlets),
and you will discover the secret behind the laws, the politics, the
science, the art, the morality, and the religion of any society. As the
old saw has it, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Marx’s version
is, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class.”21
Add to Marx’s materialistic model of foundation and super-
structure his dialectical interpretation of the foundation. The pos-
session of a society’s material wealth by a specific group of people
automatically creates a class system—basically, the owning class
(the “haves”) and the class controlled by the owning class (the “have
nots”). Because the interests of these two classes are always in op-
position, these classes must be in perpetual conflict. In the first line
of The Communist Manifesto, Marx announced, “The history of all
Marx ◆ 267
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”22 This con-
flict, which began in prehistoric times with the creation of tools, had,
in Marx’s time, reached what he took to be its most clearly delin-
eated stage, and indeed, according to him, it had reached its final
stage, a struggle between the owning class of capitalism (the bour-
geoisie) and the working class that capitalism exploited (the prole-
tariat). Marx spent the bulk of his mature years describing the
structure of capitalism in all its internal contradictions (memories of
the Hegelian dialectic!). Here are some examples: capitalism’s empha-
sis on competition leads to its own opposite, monopoly—and the
consequent expulsion of some former members of the economic elite
into the ranks of the paupers; capitalism’s constant need for new
sources of raw materials, cheap
labor, and dumping grounds for
its products leads to impe-
rialistic wars among capi-
talist states; capitalism’s
need to solve the problem of
unemployment, achieved by
pumping more money into
the system, thereby cre-
ates inflation, and its
need to solve the prob-
lem of inflation is
achieved by increasing
unemployment. Marx
thought that these
internal contradictions
of capitalism, along with
the massive unrest that
would be caused by the
ever-growing misery of its
dispossessed, would neces-
sarily bring on a simultane-

ous internal collapse of capitalism and a revolt of the working class
that would produce Marx’s notorious “dictatorship of the prole-
tariat,” whose function it would be to ensure that the victorious pro-
letariat did not reconstitute the institutions of classism. (After all,
these conquering street fighters themselves grew up in conditions of
alienation and hence in “false consciousness.”)23 According to Marx,
once this dictatorship has performed its essential service, it will sim-
ply step down from power—“wither,” as Marx worded it. Marx’s critics
are quick to point out that he did not deal with the question of the
abuse of power in his socialistic utopia. Perhaps this neglect was due
to the philosophical optimism he inherited from Hegel. (Unfortunately,
as the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union proved, Lord Acton’s pes-
simism was more realistic than Marx’s optimism. It was Acton who
said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) This
relinquishing of control by the dictatorship, predicted Marx, will usher
in a classless society, which will end the dialectic of conflict and
therefore end history as we know it. (Marx defined history, after all,
as “the history of class conflict.”) Humans will live under optimum
conditions for the first time since aboriginal times. Private ownership
will be abolished, as well as the division of labor (i.e., the type of spe-
cialization in which a per-
son is defined throughout
life by the practice of one
speciality). We will all be
artists and philosophers,
and we will “hunt in the
morning, fish in the after-
noon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize [poetry]
after dinner, just as [we]
have in mind, without ever
becoming hunter, fisher-
man, shepherd or critic.”24
Elsewhere Marx’s picture
Marx ◆ 269
of the ideal world includes socializing in the pub, going to dances,
going to the theater, buying books, loving, theorizing, painting, singing,
and even fencing. (Fencing?) Sometimes Marx’s true communist
society seems more like a bourgeois pastoral than a working-class
paradise; and sometimes, as was the case with Kierkegaard’s “new
human being,” Marx’s “new human being” seems to be a very “old
human being,” though one not from the historical past but from the
mythical Golden Age.

Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the third post-Kantian who
responded to the crisis of his time not by demanding a new “critique
of reason” but by calling for a new kind of human existence. (The other
two post-Kantians, as we have seen, were Kierkegaard and Marx.)
Nietzsche was a solitary thinker who liked Alpine trails more than the
halls of academia (which he abandoned in his mid-thirties). He spent
most of his life using his authorship in an attempt to triumph over
the powerful influences on his childhood: Lutheranism, German
nationalism, and the domination of his forceful mother, granny, aunts,
and sister. (His attempts were more successful in some of these
endeavors than in others.) The material result of his efforts was an
unprecedented stream of the most eccentric books ever to have been
introduced into the history of philosophy, including such titles as The
Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals,
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche ◆ 271
Thus Spake Zarathustra, and his outrageous intellectual autobiogra-
phy, pretentiously titled Ecce Homo (“behold the man”—the phrase
with which Pilate introduced Jesus to the masses), with such chap-
ter headings as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I
Write Such Good Books.” Nietzsche’s short, prolific authorship ended
in 1888 with the onset of insanity (probably syphilis-induced).
Nietzsche’s epistemological theory constituted a radical return
to the sophistic period. His theory is usually called perspectivism,
and it derived from Nietzsche’s early training in philology. Philologists,
those students of ancient languages, knew that what were called the
Bible, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Iliad were not direct trans-
lations of single existing documents; rather,
they were compilations of fragments of
conflicting evidence derived from a dizzy-
ing number of sources. The dream of the
philologists was to find the original
texts of each of the great scriptures
in history. Nietzsche’s conclusion as a
philologist was that there is no original
text. Each of these books is simply the
result of a decision to let a particular
interpretation represent an end product,
even though, in fact, that “end product”
is merely an emblem of a relationship
that exists among a number of fragmen-
tary documents, reports, historical stud-
ies, and items of gossip.
Nietzsche translated his philo-
logical insight into an ontological
and epistemological doctrine. Just
as in philology there is no original
text, so in reality and knowledge
there is no “pure being” nor “origi-
nal datum.” There are no gods, no

Platonic Forms, no substances, no “things-in-themselves,” or even
any “things.” There exist only flux and chaos, upon which we must
impose our will. Therefore, said Nietzsche, there can be no such thing
as knowing in the Platonic sense. All “knowing” is inventing, and all
inventing is lying. But then, there are lies, and there are lies. Inauthen-
tic lying is self-deception. According to Nietzsche, self-deceivers are
people who “lie traditionally,” that is, who lie in terms of established
traditions.
Nietzsche’s recommendation in the face of what appears to be a
condemnation to a life of lying is to “lie creatively,” which is to say to
invent, or “know,” creatively. To lie creatively is to express what Niet-
zsche, borrowing and subverting a Schopenhauerian idea, calls “will to
power.” To express will to power is to force reality to submit to one’s
own creative might. Nietzsche also calls will to power “the urge to
freedom.” All our biological instincts expend themselves as manifes-
tations of this desire for freedom, even though in
most cases these instincts have been con-
strained by the forces of normalization (them-
selves other manifestations of will to power,
or manifestations of the will to
power of others).
Not only our
biology but also
our thought and
language are man-
ifestations of will
to power. But at the
same time, language
and thought are the
main vehicles of self-
deception. According to Nietzsche’s radical nominalism (reminiscent
of William of Ockham’s nominalism), language functions precisely by
lying, that is, by denying real dissimilarities and inventing fictitious
similarities. For example, the only way we can classify as “leaves” all
Nietzsche ◆ 273
the forms of foliage that sprout
from trees and shrubs is by ignor-
ing and, indeed, suppressing the
fact that no two of these
entities are alike and by
asserting an identity
among them that does
not, in fact, exist. So
language can be and
usually is a medium of
reification and petri-
fication of being. It
produces errors that
“tyrannize over us as a
condition of life.”25 But the fact that language must lie is also the
source of the creative possibilities inherent in language. Nietzsche
rejected the traditional view of language, namely, that its poetic

function is peripheral to its literal function. He felt that the so-
called literal function was merely a subclass of its poetic nature.
Language, according to Nietzsche, is “a mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms and anthropomorphisms.”26 (Reminder: A metaphor is a
form of speech in which one image replaces another, importing the
new meaning into the old context, such as “Achilles is a lion in bat-
tle.” A metonym is a form of speech in which meaning is displaced
from one image onto an adjacent image that now bears the weight
of both images, such as “He likes the bottle too much.” Anthropo-
morphisms—the projections of human traits onto the nonhuman
Nietzsche ◆ 275
world, such as “The rose is striving to reach the light”—are them-
selves usually unconscious metaphors or metonyms.) Whole chains
of metaphors and metonyms can create a poetic rendition of reality.
Nietzsche recognized these chains of reasoning as felicitous expres-
sions of will to power.
In fact, as Nietzsche understood full well, his own term “will to
power” was the product of such a metaphorical/ metonymical chain
of reasoning, as were his other key terms, such as “the overman,”
“eternal recurrence,” and “the death of God.” It follows, then, that a
claim of Nietzsche’s—such as “life simply is will to power” 27—consti-
tutes not a philosophical insight into the ultimate nature of life but
simply another poetic interpretation of life. (When confronted with
this charge, Nietzsche responded, “Well, so much the better!”)28
If it is true that there are only interpretations, are all interpre-
tations equally valid? Despite his relativism, Nietzsche did not think
so. Only those lies that affirm life are truly noble lies for him. All
other lies are nihilistic and on the side of death. This belief is why
Nietzsche says will to power must be full of laughter, dancing, and
affirmation and why we must condemn Platonism (“that fear of
time”) and Christianity (“Platonism for the people”),29 which in
longing for another world deny reality as it is (i.e., they refuse to
recognize reality as chaos and flux that must be molded in the
image of each will), and thereby long not for being but for nothing-
ness and death. (One detects Hegel in all this, somehow.) Nietzsche
embodied his doctrine in a goal that he called “the overman” (der
Übermensch). The overman represents the triumph of the will to
power. Besides teaching laughter and dance, the overman teaches
the death of God and eternal recurrence. Of course, there can be no
single correct answer to the question, What did Nietzsche mean by
“the death of God”? (any more than there can be to the question
concerning what Prufrock meant when he said, “I should have been a
pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas”), but
surely Nietzsche at least meant to announce the end of traditional

forms of authority: historical, political, religious, moral, and textual.
(For an interesting reading of Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead,” try
replacing the term “God” with the term “Santa Claus.” Why is the
claim “Santa Claus does not exist” less tragic than the claim
“Santa Claus is dead”?)
What is true of the death of God is true of eternal recurrence.
There has been a great river of literature trying to interpret this enig-
matic doctrine. But whatever else it means, it was certainly meant to
Nietzsche ◆ 277
assert Nietzsche’s allegiance to reality as it is. Nietzsche advocated
what he took to be the opposite of the Schopenhauerian ideal of pes-
simism, namely,
the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive and world-affirming human
being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with
whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated
into all eternity.30
Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is,
without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of
nothingness: the eternal recurrence.31
It is easy enough to criticize Nietzsche for his inconsistency and

faulty logic. (How can we will life as it really is if there is no such thing
as life or will—only interpretations of interpretations? If everything
is a lie, then isn’t the claim that everything is a lie also a lie?) But
this criticism misses Nietzsche’s point. He meant to teach neither

consistency nor logic but a radically new kind of subversive subjectiv-
ity that would undermine all previous forms of thought and being.
However, there is a price to pay for such subversiveness. One will have
disciples that one might not have hoped for. And, indeed, many
diverse groups have claimed the Nietzschean heritage, including
Nazis, psychoanalysts, existentialists, and currently, a group called
“deconstructionists,” whom some people see as the new liberators
and others as the new nihilists.
Nietzsche ◆ 279
Utilitarianism
Let us leave the extravagant frenzy of Nietzsche’s (ultimately)
deranged mind and turn to the orderly and complacent minds of his
contemporaries in the British Isles (whom Nietzsche dismissed as
“blockheads”). Despite Hume’s facetious suggestion that philosophy
be abandoned altogether, a philosophical empiricism was alive and
thriving in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It derived from a side of
Hume’s thought that was not explored in this book and that is diffi-
cult to square with his radical skep-
ticism. Despite his denial of
the possibility of true
knowledge concerning
causality, self, and the
external world, Hume held
that what is commonly
taken as “knowledge” in
these areas is really a
set of reasonable beliefs
that are well founded
because they are based
on experience. The tradi-
tion deriving from this
more practical side of Hume
was inherited by a group of
philosophers known as the utili-
tarians, headed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and his wayward
follower John Stuart Mill (1808–1873), who were interested in apply-
ing the principles of empiricism to moral and social issues.
Bentham
The eccentric Jeremy Bentham (whose fully dressed, mummified body
still presides over the trustees’ meetings at University College in
London because his fortune was left to them with the provision that

he be able to attend all their meetings) concluded that all theory,
including moral and political theory, must be grounded in empirical
fact. He claimed that in the case of the human sciences this fact
would have to be the primacy of the pleasure principle. That is to say,
all analyses of human behavior and all recommendations for change
in behavior would have to begin with the fact that humans are moti-
vated by the desire for pleasure and by the aversion to pain. In this
way of thinking, of course, he was not unlike Hobbes, though Ben-
tham’s conclusions were much more liberal.
John Stuart Mill with the

Mummified Head of Jeremy Bentham
The doctrine that only pleasure can (or should) have value is
known as hedonism, and we have seen this philosophy before, not
just with Hobbes but also with Epicurus and Callicles. Bentham’s
Utilitarianism ◆ 281
innovation was the claim that hedonism doesn’t have to be egoistic;
it can be social. That is, one can (and should) be motivated to act in
the name of the pleasure of others as well as for one’s own pleasure.
His social hedonism is reflected in his most famous maxim, “It is the
greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of
right and wrong”32 (where “happiness” is defined in terms of plea-
sure). This principle, in association with the “one person, one vote”
principle (i.e., each person gets to define his or her version of happi-
ness), gave Bentham’s utilitarianism a distinctly democratic cast.
Furthermore, it meant that the moral worth of an act depended
exclusively on the amount of happiness or unhappiness that the act
promoted. This view is sometimes called consequentialism (because
it is the consequence of the act that determines the act’s value),
and it is the opposite extreme from Kant’s moral perspective, ac-
cording to which the moral worth of an action depended on the in-
tention of the agent, on whether the act was motivated by a desire
to do one’s duty, and on whether the act was consistent with the
laws of rationality.
Kant and Bentham between them have provided us with the two
key moral models used in Western ethics. Unfortunately, the conclu-
sions drawn from these two models sometimes contradict each
other, and when applied to specific cases, sometimes the utilitarian
view seems much more reasonable than the Kantian one; yet in other
cases, the Kantian view seems better than the utilitarian one. For
instance, the Kantian ethic tells us we are duty-bound never to lie.
But what if an armed man, frothing at the mouth, asks us where Bill
Jones is? Do we have a duty to tell the truth, knowing full well that
doing so may lead to Jones’s death? Here Bentham’s principle seems
better: The act of lying is not immoral if by lying we can prevent griev-
ous harm. But consider another famous example: What if you pay a
visit to a friend in the hospital, and a utilitarian physician decides to
sacrifice you and distribute your vital organs to five patients who will
die if they do not receive immediate organ implants? The doctor is
acting on the “greatest amount of happiness for the greatest num-

ber of people” principle and maybe even on the “one person, one vote”
principle. But most of us probably feel that Kant would be right to
call this sacrifice immoral.
As we saw, Bentham believed that happiness could be defined in
terms of pleasure, and he held that the study of pleasure could be
refined to a science. Pleasures could be experienced in terms of seven
categories. These categories could be articulated in terms of a set of
seven questions:
1. Intensity (How intense is the pleasure?)
2. Duration (How long does the pleasure last?)
3. Certainty (How sure is the pleasure?)
4. Proximity (How soon will the pleasure be experienced?)
5. Fecundity (How many more pleasures will follow in the train of
this pleasure?)
6. Purity (How free from pain is the pleasure?)
7. Extent (How many people will experience the pleasure?
[It is this category that makes Bentham’s hedonism a
social one.])
On a scale of one
to ten, this is about a
ten in all categories.
When considering any act whatsoever, one should analyze it in
terms of the pleasure it will produce in these seven categories, which
Bentham called “the calculus of felicity.”
He thought that after some practice one could learn to apply
this calculus rather intuitively, but until that point, one should
actually work out the figures as often as possible. (Indeed, the story
goes that Bentham himself used the calculus of felicity in choosing
between remaining a bachelor or marrying. [He married!]) Try out the
calculus on a decision such as that between studying for a chem-
istry midterm exam and going to the beach with some friends. Obvi-
ously, the beach party will be strong in some categories (1, 3, 4, 6),
and weaker in others (2, 5). Studying will be weak in most categories
but strong in a few (2 and 5, and 7 also, if other persons have an

interest in your succeeding in college). Are the assets of studying
strong enough to overcome its deficits in the face of the fun enticing
you to the beach? (Of course, the guilt you would experience at the
beach has to be taken into consideration too.) According to the
“one person, one vote” principle, each person must decide for himself
or herself.
Mill
John Stuart Mill, who was raised in strict adherence to Benthamite
tenets, developed certain qualms about those views after suffering a
nervous breakdown at twenty-one years of age. Among other con-
cerns, he was worried about the beach/chemistry–type decision, or
perhaps more about the six-pack of beer/
Shakespearean sonnet–type decision. If
Go
Niners!
the average person were given the
choice between reading a Renais-
sance poem and guzzling beer
while watching the 49ers on
the tube . . . well, you can’t
force people to read poetry or
watch football if they don’t
think it’s fun. But in a democ-
racy, under the “one person,
one vote” principle, what if you
gave people a choice of making
public expenditures for the
teaching of Shakespeare in
universities or receiving a tax
rebate? Mill feared the worst
and thought it bode ill for the advancement of civilization. If we let
ourselves be guided by the calculus of felicity, perhaps the pig would
prove to be right; wallowing in the mud might rank higher than study-
ing philosophy.
Mill solved the problem by saying that only those who are com-
petent judges of both of two competing experiences can “vote” for
one or the other of them. (You get a vote only if you know beer and
Shakespeare or have wallowed and read Plato.) Mill’s conclusion was
that “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable
than others.”33 We assume that he had in mind the reading of Shake-
speare and Plato.
Mill claimed that in abandoning the calculus of felicity, he was
simply defining pleasure in qualitative and not merely quantitative
terms. His critics charge, however, that in asserting that some
pleasures are better than others, Mill had abandoned the “principle of
utility” (i.e., the pleasure principle) altogether. They have also charged
him with elitism and with undermining the democratic foundation
that Bentham had given utilitarianism. For what it’s worth, Mill’s doc-
trine did leave us some questions to ponder: In a democracy, must
the “one person, one vote” principle apply at all levels of decision mak-
ing? And if so, are democracy and higher culture compatible?
In his most famous book, On Liberty, Mill outlined his doctrine of
laissez-faire (hands off!). There are certain spheres in which the gov-
ernment has no business interfering in the lives of its citizens. Mill’s
principle of liberty states, “the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others.” 34 In other words, Mill was
against state paternalism, the condition in which the state tells a
citizen what to do for his or her own good. For Mill, there could be no
such thing as a victimless crime. If a man decides to ride his Harley
without a helmet, get bombed on cheap wine or drugs in the privacy of
his own house, visit a prostitute, or even become a prostitute, that’s
his own business and not the state’s.
For moral reasons, we should perhaps try to persuade this man
of the error of his ways, but we have no business passing laws to
protect him from himself as long as he is doing no harm to others.
(Contemporary commentators point out that it was probably easier

to draw this distinction in Mill’s day than in our own. In today’s world,
very few acts are purely private. If you go to a hospital because of a
motorcycle injury, my tax dollars may well have to nurse you back to
health.)
Mill also believed in the hands-off doctrine in the marketplace.
He said, “Laissez-faire . . . should be the general practice: every
departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain
evil.”35 He thought that under most conditions, the government
should not interfere in the exchange of commodities, that the law
of supply and demand should determine the nature and quality of
production.
Even though Mill was considered a liberal in his own day, in many
ways his views sound to us more like those that today we associate
with political conservatism. But the proof that he was not a pure
supply-side theorist can be seen in the restrictions he placed on
the laissez-faire doctrine. He excluded from the application of his
hands-off policy any products that the buyer is not competent to
judge and any product “in the quality of which society has much at
stake.” Mill said,
There are . . . things of the worth of which the demand of the market is
by no means a test, things . . . the want of which is least felt where
the need is greatest. This is peculiarly true of those things which are
chiefly useful as tending to raise the character of human beings. The
uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation.36
Frege
The city of Jena in central Germany had been the site of Napoleon’s
decisive defeat of the Prussian forces in 1806. It was then and there
that G. W. F. Hegel hastily finished his metaphysical masterpiece, The
Phenomenology of Mind, as Napoleon’s cannon fire blasted the city

walls. We began our overview of nineteenth-century philosophy in Jena,
and we now return there, seventy years later, to complete it. In Jena
we encounter Hegel’s countryman Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), but
Frege’s work is in every way the opposite of Hegel’s—and, indeed, is
radically different from that of everyone presented in this chapter,
which treats a period that has been called “the wild years of philoso-
phy.”37 Frege toiled in relative obscurity at his office in the mathe-
matics department of the University of Jena attempting to solve
problems concerning the foundations of arithmetic that seemed at
the time to have very little to do with philosophy. But his efforts to
support his mathematical hypotheses led him to develop a general
theory of meaning that would eventually have a major impact on the
history of philosophy. He died without realizing that his accomplish-
ments would come to be seen as
the initial steps in what is now I am the sole member
called analytic philosophy of the set of all authors
of the Begriffschrift.
and that he would be The set also includes Gottlob
looked back on as Frege and my mother’s
eldest son. How is
a pioneer. Frege that possible?
directed philoso-
phy toward new
themes and new
techniques that
would come to
dominate British
and American phi-
losophy throughout
the twentieth century
and that would have a
large impact on the Conti-
nent as well.
“Analytic philosophy” may
appear to be the name of a kind of philosophy, but in fact many of
its practitioners have argued that it is the only kind of legitimate
Frege ◆ 289
philosophy left to pursue. Analytic philosophy began as a disgusted
response to the speculative philosophy that had dominated the nine-
teenth century. The outrageous metaphysical schemes that had pro-
liferated on the Continent were seen to be like a dense jungle whose
covering was so thick that it allowed no light to penetrate into the
damp and steamy atmosphere that it generated. To cut through this
kind of metaphysical speculation, these philosophers developed and
honed certain tools of logical, linguistic, and conceptual analysis that
would allow them to reveal the massive abuses of language that
these metaphysicians employed to camouflage the confusion that
they passed off as theories. The founders of analytic philosophy,
including Frege, were interested in defending against the idealism of
the metaphysicians a kind of realism—the view that there is a real
physical world “out there” and that this world is correctly grasped
either by common sense and ordinary language or by scientific inves-
tigation. Many analytic philosophers eventually abandoned the task
of generating philosophical theories at all and came to think that phi-
losophy’s job was quite simply the analysis of meaning. Some analytic
philosophers have held that the key task is the conceptual analysis
of philosophically puzzling features of natural languages, that is,
the analysis of the meaning of concepts employed in everyday dis-
course—concepts like “mind,” “body,” “perception,” “duty,” “art,” and
“justice.” Others have seen the main task as the analysis of an artifi-
cial logical language that can be detected as a hidden structure
behind natural languages, that is, the analysis of categories like
“number,” “equivalence,” “inference,” “disjunction,” “necessity,” and
“contingency.” A group of philosophers related to the previous one
sees the philosopher’s job as the logical analysis of the key concepts
of science, ideas like “causality,” “probability,” and “natural law.”
Despite their differences, all analytic philosophers owe a debt to
Frege, partly because two of the most famous analytic philoso-
phers—Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein—read his work
with great interest, discussed his ideas with him, and were influenced
by his theories.

For Frege, questions about meaning were ultimately related to
questions about logic. Our best philosophical arguments about any
topic whatsoever are only as good as the logic that structures them.
We can say that modern logic began in 1879 with the publication of
Frege’s Begriffschrift.38 This book lays out the first extensive discus-
sion of the ideas of existence and generality in logic—the relation
between propositions asserting, “There exists at least one X where X
is Y,” and those stating, “All X is Y.” This apparently simple notion had
been completely missing from Aristotle’s logic, which had dominated
philosophy from his time until the eighteenth century, when Leibniz
had made significant contributions. (In fact, Leibniz had stuck most
of his papers on logic in a desk drawer, and they saw the light of day
only in the twentieth century. Much of the actual notation in contem-
porary symbolic logic derives from Leibniz’s scribblings, but much of it
also comes from Frege.)
Frege’s next book, The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), ad-
dresses the need for a theory proving that arithmetic is internally
self-consistent (a “consistency proof”). Frege tries to show that an
extension of the basic principles of logic generates all the fundamen-
tal notions of arithmetic and that therefore the consistency of
arithmetic can be proved from purely logical considerations. A suc-
cessful definition of “number,” for example, could be derived from the
principle of identity, that is, A = A. This finding means, in fact, that
arithmetic can be reduced to logic (yet another step in the history of
reductionism that commenced with the pre-Socratics). If arithmetic
derives from logic, then it has a purely analytic a priori status. This
thesis, if true, eliminates Plato’s and Descartes’ claim that mathe-
matics is grounded in innate ideas, and it gets rid of Kant’s mathe-
matical synthetic a priori category. (You may want to review all these
terms in the Glossary.) But it also replaces the unconvincing thesis
of empiricists like Mill, who asserted that mathematical truths are
empirical generalizations. (“Well, whenever in the past we have put
two things together with three things, we’ve ended up with a total
of five things, so we will hazard that “2 + 3 = 5” is true, or at least
Frege ◆ 291
highly probable. Still, it’s
not certain. Nobody
knows for sure that
we won’t get six things
next time!”)
As good as Frege’s
discovery appears, in
1903 the young Bertrand
Russell (whom we will
study in the next chap-
ter) found a contradic-
tion in the set theory
around which Frege had
constructed his proof.
Russell’s letter to Frege
announcing the contra-
diction arrived just as
the second volume of
Frege’s Foundations was
about to be published. A horrified Frege hastily added some new
material as damage control, but he was never satisfied with his
inability to dispose of the contradiction completely. Much of the last
twenty years of his life were unproductive, and he apparently suffered
long bouts of depression during this period. He eventually came to
the conclusion that the whole project of trying to derive arithmetic
from logic was erroneous, and his last ideas on the subject drifted
back toward Kant’s synthetic a priori grounding of mathematics.
Most of the logicians who were influenced by Frege’s work chose not
to follow him in that direction. They believed that his first theory was
on the right track and that, despite his failure to resolve all the prob-
lems in the theory, his accomplishment was brilliant enough to estab-
lish him as the first true philosopher of mathematics.
Furthermore, philosophers were impressed with the general the-
ory of meaning that Frege had developed to support his mathemati-

cal theories. A main feature of the Foundations was its attack on
“psychologism” in theories of meaning. According to that prevalent
form of theorizing, the meaning of a word must be closely related to
the images that the word provokes in the minds of the speaker and
the audience. According to Frege, the mental events aroused by
words have nothing to do with a word’s meaning. The meaning of a
word is determined by the role the word plays in establishing the
truth conditions of sentences in which the word appears. For example,
consider these sentences:
A quadrilateral figure with equal sides and at least one right

angle is a square.
The walls of Fort Apache were built in the form of a square.
Circles are square.
The base of the Mayan pyramids was a square.
The earth is square.
In Kansas, basketball is played with a square ball.
Frege does not care

what images these sen-
tences conjure up in
your mind. He is inter-
ested in the conditions
that would have to exist
to establish the truth
or falsity of any of
these sentences. These
conditions are what
determine the meaning
of the word “square.”
Versions of this
thesis are accepted
today by most philoso-
phers who dedicate
themselves to the prob-
lem of meaning. They
Frege ◆ 293
look back at Frege’s formulation as the first pronouncement of an
analytic device that must be present in any successful theory
explaining how mere noises (words) can take on meaning.
A related feature of Frege’s theory that is repeated in one ver-
sion or another in many contemporary discussions of the topic of
meaning is a distinction he drew between Sinn and Bedeutung, usu-
ally translated as “sense” and “reference.” These terms are meant
to be applied to the analysis of proper names. (If you are unfamiliar
with this phrase, check it out in the Glossary.) The older view about
these terms was that their meaning was exhausted in the function
of naming, or referring to, or pointing at, the object that they named.
For example, the meaning of the name “George Washington” would
be the actual person named. The words simply stand for him and
have no meaning other than the function of designation. But Frege
points out a major difficulty with this commonsense account. Take
three proper names: (A) the morning star; (B) the evening star; and
(C) Venus. (A) refers to a heavenly body appearing in the east imme-
diately before sunrise, used for centuries by sailors to navigate the
morning seas. (B) refers to a heavenly body appearing in the west
immediately after sunset, used for centuries by sailors to navigate
the evening seas. (C) refers to the most brilliant planet in the solar
system, second in order to the sun. Now, it was an empirical discov-
ery that (A) = (B) = (C), that is, that the so-called morning star and
the so-called evening star are in fact the same body and, further-
more, that that body is the planet Venus. Now, suppose that the
meaning of a proper name is simply the object named; call that
object “X.” In that case, the sentence “The morning star is the
evening star, which in fact is the planet Venus” means “X = X, which in
fact = X.” In other words, the sentence is a tautology that conveys
no information at all. Yet, clearly the sentence in question does con-
vey information. Anyone who knows it to be true knows more than did
the ancient mariners. Therefore, concluded Frege, there must be a
third element to meaning in these cases in addition to the name and

Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star . . .
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

(A Collaborative Work of Art by Praxiteles,
Coleridge, Palmer, and an Anonymous
Author of Annoying Kiddie-Jingles)
the object named, and he called that third element Sinn (pronounced
“zinn” in German), or sense. The sense in each case “sheds a differ-
ent light” on the object referred to. It is a “mode of presentation” of
the object—a way of representing it.
Frege’s theory has not satisfied all the analytic philosophers
that descended from Frege, but it pointed out an important problem
with which any serious theory of meaning must deal. Furthermore, it
set the tone for the whole school of analytic philosophy that now
reveres Frege as a founding father.
Frege ◆ 295
Topics for Consideration
1. Hegel’s philosophy is teleological. History is revealed as progressive,
directed toward a goal. Explain how progress takes place in his system,
and why, according to Hegel, that advancement may appear to us to be
backsliding.
2. Use Hegel’s master/slave dynamics to explain relations in traditional
society between husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and stu-
dent, and employer and employee.
3. Discuss those features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that are in
agreement with Kant, and those that are in disagreement.
4. Discuss Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truths, and say why they
can be communicated only indirectly.
5. Compare and contrast Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx on the idea of
alienation.
6. Pick an example of a work of art that you think would support Marx’s
claim that most art is ideological.
7. Explain what you think Nietzsche means when he recommends that we
lie creatively.
8. It has been said that Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche did not demand
a new critique of reason; rather, they demanded a whole new kind of
human. Explain what it means to say this.
9. After reviewing Kant’s discussion of the categorical imperative
(pp. 219–21), contrast Kant’s moral idea with Bentham’s greatest hap-
piness principle. What, would you say, is the strongest and weakest
point of each moral system?
10. Do you think Mill contradicts himself when he says both that pleasure
is the ultimate criterion of value and that some pleasures are more
valuable than others? Defend or attack his view.
1 1. Using examples other than those in the text, explain why Frege believes
that the meaning of proper names must involve more than simple deno-
tation (that is, more than reference to the object named).
Notes
1. See, for example, Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, Hegel and
Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).

2. See, for example, Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures
on the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y., and
London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York and
Evanston, Ill.: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 457. The newer translation is Phenome-
nology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1977). But I “grew up” on Baillie’s translation and prefer it.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, in Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Fred-
erick G. Weiss (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), 256. In Roman mythology
Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, and the owl symbolizes her.
5. Quoted by Popper, 32–33.
6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, trans. R. B. Haldane and
J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 3.
7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949), 258.
8. Schopenhauer, 4–5.
9. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Stachey (New York:
Bantam Books, 1963), 88.
10. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin
Swenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 37.
1 1. The original German reads “Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich
ist, das ist vernünftig” (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Sämtliche
Werke, vol. 7, ed. Hermann Glockner [Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1952], 33).
My translation is the traditional one, but I should add that Hegelian scholars now
tend to prefer: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational,” because
Hegel used Wirklichkeit as a technical term meaning a synthesis of essence and
existence. This scholarly translation avoids the mistaken impression that Hegel’s
view is that whatever is, is right—which would be a tacit approval of all sorts of
vicious political regimes. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 10.
12. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Walter Lowrie and
David F. Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 315, 387.
13. Ibid., 81.
14. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness
unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 31.
15. Ibid.
16. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Poli-
tics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,
1989), 244.
17. Ibid.
18. Karl Marx, Toward the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” in Feuer, 263.
19. Marx writes: “the production of too many useful things results in too many use-
less people” (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Marx’s Con-
cept of Man, ed. Erich Fromm [New York: Ungar, 1969], 145).
20. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Feuer, 43.
21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Feuer, 26.
22. Ibid., 7.
Notes ◆ 297
23. Friedrich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism: Engels to Franz Mehring,” in
Feuer, 408.
24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Feuer, 254.
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Holling-
dale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 535.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable
Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 46–47.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1966), 203.
28. Ibid., 30–31.
29. Ibid., 3.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 35.
32. Jeremy Bentham, “A Fragment on Government,” in A Bentham Reader, ed. Mary
Peter Mack (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 45.
33. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 10.
34. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Gov-
ernment (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 95–96.
35. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. J. M. Robson, in Collected
Works: John Stuart Mill, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1965), 945.
36. Ibid., 947.
37. Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
38. Begriffschrift means roughly “conceptual writings.” The German title was retained
in the section of the book translated by Peter Geach in Translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).

7
Pragmatism, the Analytic
Tradition, and the
Phenomenological Tradition
and Its Aftermath
The Twentieth Century
Pragmatism
Let us cross at last from old Europe to the New World and visit the
pragmatists—a school that makes the first truly American contri-
bution to the history of philosophy and one that also provides a
bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The logician
and semiologist Charles Peirce (1839–1914) invented the term prag-
matism and meant it to be the name of a method whose primary
goal was the clarification of thought. Perhaps pragmatism was con-
ceived in Peirce’s mind when he read the definition of “belief” offered by
the psychologist Alexander Bain. Belief is “that upon which a man is
prepared to act,” said Bain. Peirce agreed and decided that it followed
from this definition that beliefs produce habits and that the way to
distinguish between beliefs is to compare the habits they produce.
Beliefs, then, are rules for action, and they get their meaning from
the action for which they are rules. With this definition, Peirce had
bypassed the privacy and secrecy of the Cartesian mind and had pro-
vided a direct access to mental processes (because a person’s belief
could be established by observing that person’s actions).
299
In its inventor’s hands, prag-
matism was a form of radical
empiricism, and some of Peirce’s
claims are reminiscent of Berke-
ley’s. For example, what Berkeley
said about ideas (“our idea of any-
thing is our idea of its sensible
effects”) is not unlike what Peirce
said about belief.
James
Peirce’s essay “How to Make Our
Ideas Clear,” published in 1878,
was generally ignored until inter-
preted by William James (1842–1910) some twenty-five years later.
James swore allegiance to what he took to be Peircean principles and
set out to promote the doctrine of pragmatism. But Peirce was so
chagrined at what James was doing to pragmatism that he changed
its name to “pragmaticism,” which he said was “ugly enough to be
safe enough from kidnappers.” 1
William James was born into a wealthy New
England family. (His Irish grandfather, after
whom he was named, had wisely invested in
the Erie Canal and established his fam-
ily’s fortune.) His father was a theolo-
gian with somewhat eccentric religious
ideas, but he encouraged the develop-
ment of his son’s independent thought.
William and his eventually equally
famous brother, Henry—who became
one of America’s most revered novel-
ists—were schooled in France, Germany,
Switzerland, and England before William
finally attached himself to Harvard Uni-
300 ◆ Chapter 7 The Twentieth Century

versity, first as a student of science and medicine and then as a pro-
fessor of medicine, psychology, and ultimately, philosophy. The philos-
ophy that James taught was influenced by his study of psychology
and evolutionary theory, but his philosophy was also in many ways a
response to personal psychological, moral, and religious crises that
he experienced throughout his life. Peirce’s pragmatism, as James
interpreted it, provided an objective way to address these crises.
Where Peirce had meant for pragmatism merely to provide a for-
mula for making ordinary thought more scientific, James saw it as a
philosophy capable of resolving metaphysical and religious dilemmas.
Furthermore, he saw it as both a theory of meaning and a theory of
truth. Let us first look at James’s pragmatic theory of meaning. In
Pragmatism, he wrote:
Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—
here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the
world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic
method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its
respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically
make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives
mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.2
James concluded from this thought process the following princi-

ple: “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a differ-
ence elsewhere.” 3
To clarify James’s point, we will take three sentences, each quite
different from the others, and test them for pragmatic meaning:
A. Steel is harder than flesh.
B. There is a Bengal tiger loose outside.
C. God exists.
From a pragmatic point of view, the meanings of sentences A
and B are unproblematic. We know exactly what it would be like to
believe them, as opposed to believing their opposites. If we believed an
alternative to A, it is clear that in many cases we would behave very
differently than we do behave now. And what we believe about B will
Pragmatism ◆ 301
also have an immedi- I now believe
ate impact on our that steel is
behavior. What about harder than
flesh.
sentence C ? Here we
see what James him-
self would admit to be
the subjective feature of
his theory of meaning. If
certain people believed
that God existed, they
would conceive of the
world very differently than
they would conceive of it if
they believed God did not exist.
However, there are other people whose conceptions of the world would
be practically identical (i.e., identical in
practice) whether they believed that God
did or did not exist. For these people, the
propositions “God exists” and “God does
not exist” would mean (practically) the
same thing. For certain other people who
find themselves somewhere between these
two extremes, the proposition “God exists”
means something like, “On Sunday, I put on
nice clothes and go to church,” because, for
them, engaging in this activity is the only
practical outcome of their belief (and a belief
is just a rule for action, as Peirce had said).
So much for the pragmatic theory of
meaning. Now for the pragmatic theory of
truth. James had this to say about truth:
“ideas (which themselves are but parts of
our experience) become true just insofar
as they help us to get into satisfactory

relation with other parts of our experience, . . . Truth in our ideas
means their power to ‘work.’” 4 James also said (perhaps less felici-
tously) that the issue was that of the “cash value” of ideas.5
It is interesting to compare the pragmatic theory of truth with
the other two theories of truth that have competed with each other
throughout the history of Western philosophy: the correspondence
theory and the coherence theory. The correspondence theory has
been the dominant one and has been especially favored by empiri-
cists. It says simply that a proposition is true if it corresponds with
the facts. The sentence “The cat is on the mat” is true if and only if
the cat is in fact on the mat. The main attractions of this theory
are its simplicity and its appeal to common sense. The main weak-
nesses are (1) the difficulties in explaining how linguistic entities
(words, sentences) can correspond to things that are nothing like
language, (2) the difficulty in stating exactly what it is that sen-
tences are supposed to correspond to (facts? What is a “fact” if not
that which a true sentence asserts?), and (3) a particular awkward-
ness in its application to mathematics (what is it to which the
proposition “5 ⫹ 2 ⫽ 7” corresponds?). The coherence theory of
truth asserts that a proposition is true if it coheres with all the
other propositions taken to be true. This theory has been preferred
by rationalists. Its greatest strength is that it makes sense out of
the idea of mathematical truth (“5 ⫹ 2 ⫽ 7” is true because it is
entailed by “7 ⫽ 7,” and by “1 ⫹ 6 ⫽ 7,” and by “21 ⫼ 3 ⫽ 2 ⫻ 3 ⫹ 1,”
etc., etc.). Its greatest weakness is its vicious circularity. Proposition
A is true by virtue of its coherence with propositions B, C, and D.
Proposition B is true by virtue of its coherence with propositions A, C,
and D. Proposition C is true by virtue of its coherence with A, B, and
D, and so forth. (Think of the belief system of a paranoid. All his
beliefs cohere perfectly with one another. Everything that happens to
him is evidence that everybody is out to get him.)
Now, the pragmatist says that the test of correspondence
and the test of coherence are not competing theories, but simply
different tools to be applied to beliefs to see if those beliefs “work.”
Pragmatism ◆ 303
Why are you
staring at me?
And you! . . .
Hey, you! You’re Stop following
pretending not to me!
notice me so
you can plot
against me!
The Paranoid Theory of Truth
Sometimes one test is a satisfactory tool, sometimes the other, but

neither is the sole criterion of truth. James’s most extended account
of truth is this:
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and
verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. . . . The truth of an idea is
not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It
becomes true, is made true by events.6
If we return to our three model sentences, we see that A certainly
works. Believing that steel is harder than flesh definitely puts us in a
much more satisfactory relation to the rest of our experience than
does believing the opposite. For most of us, B usually does not work.
Under typical conditions, believing that there is a Bengal tiger loose
outside the room we now occupy would put us in a paranoid relation
with the rest of our experience. Of course, some times believing it to
be true would work. (Namely, we are tempted to say, when there really
is a tiger outside.)

What about the third example? Obviously, the truth or falsity of
the claim that God exists cannot even come up for those people for
whom there is no practical difference whether they believe it or not.
But for those people for whom the distinction is meaningful, the
pragmatic test of truth is available. Unlike for the propositions in
sentences A and B, there is no direct pragmatic test of the proposi-
tion “God exists.” In fact, the empirical evidence, according to James,
is equally indecisive for or against God’s existence. About this and
similar cases, James said, “Our passional nature not only lawfully
may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is
a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual
grounds.”7 (In asserting this, James sounded very much like Kant.)
James went on to say that for many people, the belief in God does
work, though he was prepared to admit that for a few it does not
work. Rather, a belief in God puts some people in a state of paranoic
fear vis-à-vis the rest of their experiences. So, for the first group, the
Pragmatism ◆ 305
proposition “God exists” is
true, and for the second
group, it is false.
It was this subjective
side of James’s theory of
truth that displeased
many philosophers, includ-
ing Peirce. This feature of
pragmatism was some-
what ameliorated by the
work of John Dewey. First,
one last point about
James: The allusion earlier
to the similarity between
him and Kant was not gra-
tuitous. Both Kant and
James tried to justify on prac-
tical grounds our right to hold certain moral and religious values that
cannot be justified on purely intellectual grounds. Furthermore, just
as Kant had seen himself as trying to mediate between the rational-
ists and the empiricists, so did James see himself as mediating
between what he called the “tender-minded” and the “tough-minded”
philosophers:
The Tender-Minded The Tough-Minded
Rationalistic Empiricist
(going by “principles”) (going by “facts”)
Intellectualistic Sensationalistic
Idealistic Materialistic
Optimistic Pessimistic
Religious Irreligious
Free-willist Fatalistic
Monistic Pluralistic
Dogmatical Skeptical

The trouble with these alternatives, said James, was that
“you find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and
a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough.”8 Obviously,
James thought that his pragmatism offered a third, more satisfy-
ing, alternative.
Dewey
John Dewey (1859–1952) was perhaps the
most influential of the pragmatists—if
for no other reason than that he outlived
them by so many years.
He was actually schooled in
Hegelian idealism (which in the
second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury had a great impact on Ameri-
can and British philosophy, as we
will see), and it left a permanent
dent in Dewey’s way of thinking,
contextualizing as it did all philosophy in
terms of history, society, and culture.
But under the influence of James as
well as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution,
Dewey drifted away from Hegelianism.
Whereas Hegel found humanity progressing
by resolving certain logical contradictions
in the ideational sphere, Dewey found prog-
ress in the resolution of certain organic
conflicts between individuals and their
social and natural environments. From
Darwin, Dewey learned that consciousness,
mind, and intellect were not something
different from nature, opposed to it and
standing in splendid aloofness above it;
rather, they were adaptations to nature,
Pragmatism ◆ 307
continuous with it, and like other appendages of plants, insects, and
animals, functioned best when used to solve problems posed to them
by the natural world.
Such an idea fit easily into the schema of the pragmatism of
Peirce and James. For James, however, pragmatism had been a
therapeutic tool for dealing primarily with certain religious and meta-
physical conflicts, and with individual psychology. Dewey was more
concerned with
social psychology.
His basic philosophi-
cal interests were in
politics, education,
and morality.
According to
Dewey, higher or-
ganisms develop as
problem-solving mecha-
nisms by learning routines
that transcend purely
instinctual responses. We call
these routines “habits.” As the
organism’s environment becomes
more ambiguous and the organism
itself becomes more complex, its
responses become more “mental.” Intelligence evolves when habit fails
to perform efficiently. Intelligence interrupts and delays a response
to the environment when a problematic situation is recognized as
problematic. Thought is, in fact, a “response to the doubtful as such.”
The function of reflective thought is to turn obscurity into clarity.
Such a transformation is called “knowledge.” The move from ignorance
to knowledge is the transition from “a perplexed, troubled, or con-
fused situation at the beginning [to] a cleared-up, unified, resolved
situation at the close.” 9 Ideas are plans for action. They are “desig-
nations of operations to be performed”; they are hypotheses. Thinking

is simply “deferred action.” Thoughts that do not pass into actions
that rearrange experience are useless thoughts. (The same is true of
philosophies.)
There is [a] first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is
offered us: Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred
back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them
more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealing with them
more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary
experience more opaque than they were before and depriving them of
having in “reality” even the significance that they seemed to have? 10
Traditional epistemologists, whether rationalist or empiricist,

have erred. They believed that what was to be known was some reality
preexisting the act of knowing. For them, the mind is the mirror of
reality, or what Dewey called “the spectator theory of knowledge.” It
sought to find certainty, either in universals (rationalism) or in sense
data (empiricism). But universals and sense data are not the objects
of knowledge; rather, they are the instruments of knowledge. One of
the consequences of Dewey’s revision is that philosophy must aban-
don what hitherto had been considered as “ultimate questions”
about Being and Knowledge. Knowledge must be instrumental. Its
function is to solve problems.
Pragmatism ◆ 309
Strictly speaking, then, the object of knowledge is constructed
by the inquiring mind. Knowledge changes the world that existed prior
to its being known, but not in the Kantian sense in which it distorts
reality (the noumenal world); rather, knowledge changes the world in
the sense that it imposes new traits on the world, for example, by
clarifying that which was inherently unclear.
The function of reflective thought is to transform a situation in which
there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbances of some
sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious.11
According to Dewey, the definition of the world as the totality of

substances (things) was abandoned with the advent of modern sci-
ence, which revealed not “objects” but relationships. In abandoning
that definition, science also dissolved the distinction between know-
ing and doing. Galileo is credited by Dewey for initiating this revolu-
tion, a revolution that all but philosophers have accepted. Science
allows us to escape from the tyranny of the past and allows us to
exert some control over our natural and social environment. And yet,
it is not only scientists who know. Poets, farmers, teachers, states-
people, and dramatists know. Nevertheless, ultimately all must look
to the scientists for a methodology. In fact, science is just a sophis-
ticated form of common sense. Science, or its strategies, should play
the role in the contemporary world that the Church played in the
medieval world. Scientific techniques must be applied to the develop-
ment of both values and social reform.
For Dewey, there is no dichotomy between scientific facts and
values. Values are a certain kind of facts found in experience, facts
such as beauty, splendor, and humor. But like the products of every
other intervention into reality, they reveal themselves relative to the
interests of the inquirer. But Dewey’s “pragmatic instrumentalism” is
not just a form of utilitarianism. The error of utilitarianism is to
define value in terms of objects antecedently enjoyed; but for Dewey,
just because something has been enjoyed does not make that thing
worthy of enjoyment. Without the intervention of thought, enjoy-
ments are not values. To call something valuable is to say that it
fulfills certain conditions—namely, that it directs conduct well.
There is a difference between the loved and the lovable, the blamed
and the blamable, the admired and the admirable. What is needed is
an active and cultivated appreciation of value. Its development is a
supreme goal, whether the problem confronted is intellectual, aes-
thetic, or moral.
In fact, the ultimate goal of action should be the full develop-
ment of individuals as human beings. Therefore, democracy and
education have the same goal. Each individual has something to con-
tribute to the construction of social institutions, and the test of
value of all institutions will be the contributions they make back to
the individual in terms of creating the conditions for the all-around
growth of every member of society. Such growth involves achieving
Pragmatism ◆ 311
certain kinds of experiences that are final, in that they do not pro-
voke the search for some other experience. These are aesthetic expe-
riences. Sometimes, according to Dewey, these experiences are so
intense that they are designated as “religious.”
The Analytic Tradition

Shortly before the turn of the century, an amazing phenomenon
occurred in Britain, and the ripple effect brought it to America.
The British discovered Hegel! This discovery took place long after
Hegelianism had been declared dead on the Continent. Neo-
Hegelianism found some able defenders in men like F. H. Bradley at
Oxford, J. E. McTaggart at Cambridge, and Josiah Royce at the
University of California. But the Anglo-American national characters
(if there are such things) could not have been very comfortable with

Hegelian idealism, and it is not surprising that a realist reaction
was soon provoked. (Notice that “realism” is used here in the Lockean
sense of naming a real external world and not in the medieval sense
of naming the reality of Platonic Forms.) This revolt was led by G. E.
Moore and Bertrand Russell.
Moore
George Edward Moore (1873–1958) had come to Cambridge to study
classical literature (“the Greats,” as it is known there), and part of
his program involved taking philosophy classes, where, according to
him, he heard the most astonishing things asserted—things to
which he could attach no precise meaning. It seemed to him that
the lectures were full of denials of
things that every sane human
knew to be true. Moore must
have been an annoying under-
graduate. If McTaggart asserted
that space was unreal, Moore
would ask if that meant that the
wall next to him was not nearer
than the library building; if
McTaggart asserted that time
was unreal, Moore wanted
to know if that meant that
the class would not end at
noon. Russell found Moore’s
“naive” questions to be
very exciting. Years later
Russell wrote of Moore:
He took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipa-
tion. Bradley argued that everything common sense believes in is mere
appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and thought that
everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or
theology, supposes real. With a sense of escaping from prison we
The Analytic Tradition ◆ 313

allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars
would exist if no one was aware of them.12
Moore continued to defend common sense throughout his life,

even though Russell would later find his own reasons for doubting it.
(Russell: “Science itself has shown that none of these common-sense
notions will quite serve for the explanation of the world.”)13 Indeed,
Moore came to be known as the “philosopher of common sense.” Com-
mon sense became for him what sense data had been for the empiri-
cists and what reason had been for the rationalists—namely, the
foundation of certainty. In one of his most famous essays, “A
Defence of Common Sense,” Moore listed a series of propositions
that he claimed to know with certainty to be true, including these:
A. There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.
B. This body was much smaller when it was born than it is now.
C. Ever since it was born it has been in contact with, or not far
from, the surface of the earth.
D. Ever since it was born it has been at various distances from
a great number of physical objects.

E. The earth had existed many years before my body was born.
F. Many other human bodies had existed before my body was
born, and many of them had already died before my birth.
This list goes on and on. It is a rather boring list, but Moore
knew full well that his list was tedious. The point is that, according to
him, every one of these propositions has been denied by some philoso-
pher, somewhere, sometime. The truth usually is boring, and we should
get suspicious when we hear dramatic metaphysical theses that
deny commonplace beliefs, such as the Hegelian claims: Time and
space have no objective reality; the individual is an abstraction;
mathematics is only a stage in the dialectic; the Absolute is
expressed, but not revealed, in the world. Moore did not necessarily
want to claim that these assertions were untrue, only that they were
strange and that no obvious meaning could be attached to them.
As Moore’s student and friend John Maynard Keynes said, the ques-
tion most frequently on Moore’s lips was, “What exactly do you
mean?” And, said Keynes, “If it appeared under cross-examination
that you did not mean
exactly anything, you
lay under a strong
suspicion of meaning
nothing whatever.”
The Hegelian
philosophers at Cambridge
and Oxford in the 1880s and
1890s had spent a lot of time
inventing new philosophical ter-
minology in order to devise
novel ways of talking, because
they all seemed to agree that
there was something defective
about our ordinary discourse
concerning the world. Moore was not a bit convinced that these new
ways of speaking were really necessary. He wanted to know exactly
what was wrong with ordinary language. Moore’s commitment to our
normal way of thinking and talking about the world is seen very clearly
in this passage from “A Defence of Common Sense”:
I [assume] that there is some meaning which is the ordinary . . . mean-

ing of such expressions as “The earth has existed for many years
past.” And this, I am afraid is an assumption which some philosophers
are capable of disputing. They seem to think that the question “Do
you believe that the earth has existed for many years past?” is not a
plain question, such as should be met either by a plain “Yes” or “No,” or
by a plain “I can’t make up my mind,” but is the sort of question which
can be properly met by: “It all depends on what you mean by ‘the earth’
and ‘exists’ and ‘years’: If you mean so and so, and so and so, and so
and so, then I do; but if you mean so and so, and so and so, and so
and so, or so and so, and so and so, and so and so, or so and so,
and so and so, and so and so, then I don’t, or at least I think it is
extremely doubtful.” It seems to me that such a view is as profoundly
mistaken as any view can be.14
It is very clear that, It all depends.

with Moore, the aim of If you mean so and
I’m conducting so, and so and so,
philosophy is not a survey. Do you then I do . . .
that of generating believe that the
earth has existed
grandiose meta- for many
physical schemes, years past?
nor is it even that of
arriving at the truth
(much less, the Truth);
rather, its goal is the
clarification of meaning.
This goal puts Moore
squarely in the camp of the
analytic philosophy that Frege
had pioneered—a kind of philosophy that, for better or for worse,
was to dominate a great part of the twentieth century. Moore was
the initiator of what might almost be called a movement: one that
was antimetaphysical, concerned with detailed analysis, obsessed

with the problem of meaning, and far removed from the social, politi-
cal, and personal problems that afflicted people of his day. Further-
more, with his concern with precise language, Moore took the first
step in the direction that has since been called the “linguistic turn.”
We will see all these features again in Russell, in the logical posi-
tivists, and in Wittgenstein.
For all his virtues, Moore seems a bit too complacent to many
philosophers today. His perhaps overly satisfied attitude toward the
world can be easily detected in the following passage:
I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have sug-
gested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philo-
sophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said
about the world and the sciences.15

Russell
Moore’s friend at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), was born
into a prominent noble family. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was
a British prime minister. Bertrand himself inherited an earldom. He
was privately educated, and he early demonstrated unusual mathe-
matical skills. His temporary flirtation with Hegelianism must have
gone against all his native instincts and abilities. The philosophy of
McTaggart and Bradley had no use for the mathematical and scien-
tific precision for which Russell had a natural affinity. As we saw,
Moore helped Russell break away from Hegelianism’s fatal attraction,
Hegelianism’s Fatal Attraction
and for a brief period Moore and Russell thought alike. But Moore did
not know mathematics and was uninterested in science; so even
though Moore and Russell always agreed that the main job of the
philosopher was that of analysis, they soon went their separate
philosophical ways.
In 1900 Russell went to the International Congress of Philoso-
phy in Paris and met the great mathematician and logician Guiseppe
Peano. Conversations with him and other mathematical luminaries

such as Gottlob Frege set Russell on a path that led to one of his
major works, Principia Mathematica, written in collaboration with
Alfred North Whitehead in 1910–1913. This work was a protracted
defense of Frege’s thesis that all of arithmetic is an extension of the
basic principles of logic. Probably Russell’s major contribution to the
history of philosophy was his
So True! So True! demonstration of the
power of symbolic logic
as a tool of philosophi-
cal analysis.
A key feature of
Russell’s overall view
was his belief in phi-
losophy’s subordina-
tion to science.
Russell thought
that philosophy
should be built on
science rather
than the other
way around
because there was
less risk of error in
science than in philosophy. He was one of many analytical philoso-
phers who assumed that “science is innocent unless proved guilty,
while philosophy is guilty unless proved innocent.”16 The fact that
Russell saw philosophy as ancillary to science, along with the fact
that science was changing so rapidly during the period in which Rus-
sell wrote, partially explains why Russell’s philosophy evolved so much
over the many years that he developed it. His most uncharitable crit-
ics claimed that Russell made a philosophical career for himself by
writing a book every year in which he refuted his book of the previous
year. And indeed, it is difficult to state exactly what Russell’s philos-
ophy is, precisely because of its many transformations over the

years. But there were certain common denominators that survived
and unified his views despite all the changes. One constant in his
thought was his view of philosophy as essentially analytical. In 1924
he wrote:
Although . . . comprehensive construction is part of the business of

philosophy, I do not believe it is the most important part. The most
important part, to my mind, consists in criticizing and clarifying
notions which are apt to be regarded as fundamental and accepted
uncritically. As instances I might mention: mind, matter, conscious-
ness, knowledge, experience, causality, will, time. I believe all these
notions to be inexact and approximate, essentially infected with
vagueness, incapable of forming part of any exact science.17
Another constant in Russell’s philosophy was his commitment

to Ockham’s razor, which, as we have seen, is a plea for theoretical
simplicity, an injunction not to “multiply entities beyond necessity.”
Russell formulated it thus: “Wherever
possible, substitute constructions out
of known entities for inferences to un-
known entities.” 18 He thought we should
try to account for the world in terms of
those features of it with which we have
direct acquaintance and we should
avoid the temptation of positing the
existence of anything with which we
cannot be acquainted, unless we are
forced to do so by undeniable facts or
by a compelling logical argument.
I will let Russell’s “Theory of Descrip-
tions,” which he took to be one of his major
contributions to philosophy, represent his
views: From Plato forward, philosophers
had struggled with the logic of the con-
cept of existence, and many of them, including Plato, were driven to
create grandiose metaphysical schemes to accommodate the prob-

lems caused by that concept. Russell found most of these schemes
to be too metaphysical (i.e., too much in violation of the strictures of
Ockham’s razor) or to be simply too paradoxical. Let us look at three
such problems dealing with the question of existence.
1. I say, “The golden mountain does not exist.” You ask, “What is
it that does not exist?” I answer, “The golden mountain.” By doing so,
I seem to be attributing a kind of existence to the very thing whose
existence I just denied.
(And what thing is
that?) Further-
more, if I say,
“Unicorns do
not exist” and
“Round squares do
not exist,” I seem to be
saying that golden moun-
tains, unicorns, and round squares
are three different things, and none of
them exists! The Platonists’ solution to
this problem was to say that terms like
“the golden mountain” designate ideals
that exist in a realm of pure being, but not
in the physical world. Clearly, such a view
would be too metaphysical for Russell
and would cry out for the application of
Ockham’s razor.
2. Consider the sentence “Scott is
the author of Waverley.” Logicians have held that if two terms denote
the same object, these terms could be interchanged without chang-
ing the meaning or truth of the proposition being expressed by the
sentence. (If A ⫽ B, then [A ⫽ B] = [B ⫽ A] ⫽ [A ⫽ A] ⫽ [B ⫽ B].)
Now, the novel Waverley was published anonymously, and many people
wanted to know who wrote it. King George IV was particularly inter-
ested to know because he wanted to find out who was maligning his

ancestors. The king did not want to know whether the sentence “The
author of Waverley is the author of Waverley” was true, nor if the sen-
tence “Sir Walter Scott
is Sir Walter Scott”
was true. (Though a
Platonic/Leibnizian
solution to the
problem would be
that, indeed, all
sentences are
versions of the
proposition
“Everything is
everything,” or
“A = A.” But such a meta-
physical “solution” could never satisfy a Bertrand Russell.)
3. Consider this sentence: “The present king of
France is bald.” This assertion seems false
(because there is no such person), but
according to the law of the excluded
middle, the negation of any false propo-
sition must be true, so it follows that
there must be truth to the claim “The pre-
sent king of France is not bald.” Yet surely
that sentence is false too. Must we once
again accept some kind of metaphysical solu-
tion to the dilemma by consigning to an ideal
realm of being the object designated by the
term “the present king of France,” along with
the ideal characteristics “bald” and “hairy”?
The Platonic logicians thought so. Russell
thought not. (Russell said that the Hegelians
would find the solution in a synthesis: “The
present king of France wears a toupee.”)

So here we have three different logical problems concerning the
concept of being or existence. The goal of Russell’s Theory of Descrip-
tions was to unveil the true logical structure of propositions about
existence in order to eliminate paradoxes and metaphysical obfusca-
tions. Russell discovered a formula that he thought could perform
this job:
There is an entity C, such that the sentence

– C.
“X is Y” is true if and only if X –
In this formula, C is an entity, Y is a characteristic written in

the form of an adjective, and X is the subject to which the adjective is
attributed. For example, the sentence “The golden mountain does not
exist” is rendered by Russell as: “There’s no entity C, such that the
sentence ‘X is golden and mountainous’ is true if and only if X = C.” In
other words, the offending term, “the golden mountain” (offending
because it seems to denote an entity, that is, name a thing) has
been transformed into a description (golden and mountainous), and
the real assertion of the proposition is that there is no existing
object that could be correctly characterized using that description.
Notice that the notion of “existence” has been analyzed out of the
term “the golden mountain.”
Concerning the second problem, the sentence “Scott is the
author of Waverley” becomes “There is an entity C, such that ‘X wrote
Waverley’ is true if and only if X = C; moreover, C is Scott.” So the
characteristic “authorly” properly describes an existing entity
(Scott) and does so in a way that is not merely tautological. Notice
once again that the notion of existence has been analyzed out of the
description “the author of Waverley.”
Finally, the sentence “The present king of France is bald” means
“There is an entity C, such that ‘X is kingly, French, and bald’ is true if
and only if X = C.” But there is no entity to which such a description

correctly applies, so the sentence
True Being exists only in
is false; and so is its negation the realm of Being: Plato
because there is also no entity Being truly exists as an
that is correctly described as actuality of a potentiality:
Aristotle
being “kingly, French, and hairy.” True Being is Perfection, and
So we can assert that both sen- Perfection is True Being: Anselm
tences are false without violating There is no True Being. Being is
a mere word, naming nothing:
the law of the excluded middle. William of Ockham
In each of these three cases, Being is truly a characteristic
of either of two substances:
Russell applied Ockham’s razor and Descartes
excised the concept of existence. True Being is monadic: Leibniz
Russell rather immodestly said of
Being? Beats me! Truly, Hume
his solution, “This clears up two
Being is not a predicate: Kant
millennia of muddle-headedness
about ‘existence,’ beginning with Being is the Rational, and the
__
Rational is (Bes?): Hegel
Plato’s Theaetetus.” 19 Being is the manifestation of
The exposition of the Theory the Will: Schopenhauer
of Descriptions has probably been Being does not exist; only
Will to Power is: Nietzsche
the most technical presentation in
Being cannot be thought: Kierkegaard
this book, and even then, it has
been greatly simplified. Much of There is an entity c,
Russell’s philosophy was highly such that “x is y” is true
if and only if x – – c.
specialized, but Russell the techni-
cal philosopher contrasted greatly
with Russell the social critic and
activist. He spent part of World
War I in jail as a pacifist. (He was disappointed that Moore joined the
war effort as a British officer, and he was even more disappointed
that his student Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to the Continent to
join the Austrian army as a private.) Russell was a harsh critic of the
social policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, and
after World War II he became an active protester against nuclear
weapons. (He was jailed when he was eighty-nine years old for inciting

the public to civil disobedience after an illegal rally in Hyde Park to
protest the presence of American atomic weapons in Britain; in his
nineties, he was actively engaged in preaching against the American
involvement in Vietnam.) In this respect, Russell was the very oppo-
site of G. E. Moore, who, as we’ve seen, never found anything to
engage his intellect and passions except things said by other
philosophers. In 1960 when the journalist Ved Mehta went to Russell’s
home to interview him about his philosophy, Mehta was met by Rus-
sell at the door and was asked by Russell if he had not heard about
The Bomb. Russell told Mehta that in the face of the implications of
the nuclear crisis, there was no time to discuss philosophy.
Logical Positivism
The paradigmatic case of the view that philosophy’s job is that of
logical analysis came from a group of European philosophers who are
known as the logical positivists. Their movement grew out of some
seminars in the philosophy of science offered at the University of
Vienna in the early 1920s by Professor Moritz Schlick. The original
group, which called itself the “Vienna Circle,” was composed mostly of
scientists with a flair for philosophy and a desire to render philoso-
phy respectable by making it scientific. Their technical inspiration
came primarily from the work of Ernst Mach, Jules Poincaré, and
Albert Einstein. The models for their idea of logical analysis came
from Principia Mathematica, by Russell and Whitehead, and from
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, recently published by Wittgenstein.
(Much to the great annoyance of its members, Wittgenstein stayed
aloof from the Vienna Circle—you will read a lot more about Wittgen-
stein shortly.)
The Vienna Circle was positively antagonistic toward most of
the history of philosophy, finding only Hume’s empiricism and Kant’s
antimetaphysical stance worthy of respect.
Besides Schlick (who was murdered in 1936 by an insane student
on the steps of the University of Vienna), other people associated

with the movement were Otto
Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, A. J.
Ayer, and Rudolf Carnap. By the
early 1930s, their passion for
scientific truth was well known,
so they were not much liked
by the Nazis (whose views
did not fare well in the light
of scientific scrutiny); nor
did the members of the
Circle like the Nazis
much, and the advent
of Hitler’s regime
scattered the group
throughout British and
American universities,
where they exerted even
more influence than per-
haps they might have done
had they remained in Austria
and Germany.
At the risk of oversimplify-
ing the platform of logical positivism (but only slightly), I can say
that the main project of the Vienna Circle was the resurrection and
updating of Hume’s Fork. All putative propositions would be shown
to be either analytic (tautologies whose negation leads to self-
contradiction), synthetic (propositions whose confirmation depends
on observation and experimentation), or nonsense. The positivists’
conclusions were therefore like Hume’s in many respects. For example,
Carnap wrote, “In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy
of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative
result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely
meaningless.” Take a look at Carnap’s analysis of the function of
language:20

EXPRESSIVE FUNCTION REPRESENTATIVE FUNCTION
of LANGUAGE of LANGUAGE
Arts Science (–– the System of Theoretical Knowledge)

Lyrical Verses, Empirical Sciences
etc.
1.(Metaphysics)
Physics, Biology,
2.(Psychology) etc.
3.Logic
We see that language has only two duties: expression and repre-
sentation. Once psychology has been correctly established as an
empirical science and metaphysics correctly recognized as an art
form, philosophy is seen to be nothing but logic. According to Carnap,
there is nothing wrong with the poetic function of metaphysics as
long as it is identified and treated as such. Carnap wrote,
The non-theoretical character of metaphysics would not be in itself a
defect; all arts have this non-theoretical character without thereby
losing their high value for personal as well as social life. The danger lies
in the deceptive character of metaphysics; it gives the illusion of
knowledge without actually giving any knowledge.21
Even some of Hume’s skeptical musings were too metaphysical

for the positivists. Hume had claimed that there was no good reason
to believe that any event ever caused another event because there
was no sense datum representing any cause, only sense data repre-
senting series of events. But for Schlick, Hume’s search for an entity
to correspond to the name “cause” was itself suspect. Schlick said,
“The word cause, as used in everyday life, implies nothing but regular-
ity of sequence because nothing else is used to verify the proposi-
tions in which it occurs. . . . The criterion of causality is successful
prediction. That is all we can say.” 22
Schlick’s comments about causality reveal another feature of
the positivistic view, namely, that (in the case of synthetic claims) the
meaning of a proposition is its method of verification. Furthermore,

the language of verification would have to be reduced to what were
called “protocol sentences.” Protocol sentences were to be assertions
that expressed the raw verifiable facts with complete simplicity. These
sentences would be “the absolutely indubitable starting points of all
knowledge,” according to Schlick. An example would be “Moritz Schlick
perceived red on the 6th of May, 1934, at 3:03 P.M. in the room num-
bered 301 in the Philosophy Hall at the University of Vienna.” The logi-
cal positivists, looking for incorrigibility as the foundation of science,
decided that even protocol sentences were not certain enough
because they did not designate the simplest facts, so they tried to
reduce protocol sentences yet further to what they called “confirma-
tion sentences,” an example of which would be “Red here now.” These
sentences were more certain
because they were less complex
than protocol sentences; “I saw a book.”
but the trouble with them
turned out to be that the
act of writing down the The person whose acquaintances call him
M.S., and whose passport No. 13456 is registered
phrase “here now” pro- with the Austrian government, and who is myself,
duced a meaning not could correctly have said on May 6th, 1934,
at 3:03 P.M. in room 301 of the University of
identical to the actual Vienna, “I perceive red.”
pointing that took place
when the confirmation sen-
Red here now
tence was uttered. Not only
that, but to name the experience
as “red” seemed to transcend the GRUNT!
perceptual event by categorizing it
as a member of the class of red
experiences, thereby referring to more than what was actually present
in the experience. Ultimately, it was suggested that certainty could be
found only in an act of pointing and grunting.
By now it was beginning to become obvious that something had
gone very wrong and that this part of the positivist program was
hopeless. The logical positivists had tried to find the foundations of

science, and instead
they had reverted to
the cave dweller mental-
ity. They fell to squab-
bling over this problem,
and it was never
resolved to anyone’s
satisfaction, including
their own.
We have seen Car-
nap’s demonstration
that metaphysics is
only an expressive, not
representative, form of
language. The posi-
tivists performed a similar outrage on moral language, claiming that
it was simply a disguised display of emotion, often coupled with “com-
mands in a misleading grammatical form,” according to Carnap.23 So
the sentence “Stealing is immoral” really means something like this:
Therefore, the so-called sentence “Stealing is immoral” is

really only the expression of emotion and can be neither true nor
false. It expresses what Ayer called a “pseudo-concept.” 24 Such
were the moral consequences of the positivists’ radical application
of Hume’s Fork.

Needless to say, most philosophers were not very satisfied with
this account of ethics. Furthermore, as has been indicated, logical
positivism began to come undone over its failure to find the much-
heralded incorrigibility in protocol sentences and confirmation sen-
tences. (As one commentator
put it, the positivists set
out to sea unfurling the
sails of what they
took to be a water-
tight “man-o’-war,”
only to find that it
leaked badly. They
began patching
the leaks and dis-
covered that the
patches leaked. By
the time the ship sank,
they were patching
patches on patches.) Logical
positivism came to its final grief over another internal question: If
all propositions are either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense, what is
the status of the proposition “All propositions are either analytic,
synthetic, or nonsense”? It too must be either analytic, synthetic,
or nonsense. If it is analytic (Ayer’s view), it is a mere tautology and
tells us nothing about the world. Furthermore, in this case, we should
be able to look up the word “proposition” in the dictionary and dis-
cover it to be defined in terms of analyticity and syntheticity. But
it’s not. If the proposition is synthetic (Carnap’s view), then we
should be able to verify it empirically. But verification isn’t possible
either. So it looks as though the key principle of positivism is neither
analytic nor synthetic. Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus had been the main inspiration of positivism, took the
heroic step of claiming that it was nonsense (though, as we will see,
he thought some nonsense was better than other nonsense). This

quandary pretty much
spelled the end of logical
positivism. Perhaps
Professor Jon Wheat-
ley was writing its obit-
uary when he said,
“Logical positivism is
one of the very few
philosophical positions
which can be easily
shown to be dead wrong,
and that is its principal
claim to fame.”25
Wittgenstein
The author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the book that so
inspired the logical positivists, was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
He has earned himself a longer
discussion in this overview
Was sich überhaupt sagen
than have most philosophers
lässt, lässt sich klar sagen;
because he has the unusual und wovon man nicht reden kann,
distinction of having inspired darüber muss man schweigen.
two philosophical move-
ments: logical positivism and
what came to be known as
“ordinary language philoso-
phy.” Each of these move-
ments dominated a portion of
the analytic tradition in the
twentieth century, and ironically,
in many respects the later movement
refutes the earlier movement.
Wittgenstein was born into a wealthy, refined, Viennese family.
Uninterested in material riches, he gave away his entire inheritance.

In 1911 he went to Manchester, England, to study aeronautical engi-
neering. His genius for mathematical thinking was soon recognized,
and he was directed to Cambridge to study
with Bertrand Russell. When Wittgen-
stein returned to Austria to enlist
in the army during World War I, one
story has it that he put a ream
of paper in his backpack and
went into the trenches with it.
He was soon taken captive by
the Italians and, as a prisoner
of war, set about writing the
Tractatus (which puts that
work in the category of “great
books written in jail,” along
with Boethius’s The Consola-
tions of Philosophy and part
of Cervantes’ Don Quixote).
The Tractatus, which is
barely 100 pages long, is set up
as a series of seven propositions.
Each proposition is followed by a
sequence of numbered observations about each proposition, or
observations about the observations, or observations about the
observations about the observations. For instance, the first page
begins thus:
1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all
the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and
also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.

1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything
else remains the same.
2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of
affairs.26
Wittgenstein held the view that, because we can say true things
about the world, the structure of language must somehow reflect the
structure of the world. That is part of what he means in paragraph
1.1, “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Now, what are
the facts of which the world consists? They are, to use Russell’s
term, “atomic facts.” They are the simplest facts that can be as-
serted and are the simple truths into which all other more complex
truths can be analyzed. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not say
exactly what these facts were, and it was these facts that the posi-
tivists were seeking with their attempts to construct protocol sen-
tences and confirmation sentences.
The positivists liked other features of the Tractatus as well.
They particularly approved of the conception of philosophy that
Wittgenstein put forth:
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical
works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any
answer to questions of this kind, but can only establish that they are
nonsensical. (4.003)
The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say

nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural sci-
ence—i.e., something that has
nothing to do with philosophy—
and then, whenever someone else
wanted to say something meta-
physical, to demonstrate to him
that he had failed to give a mean-
ing to certain signs in his proposi-
tions . . . this method would be the
only strictly correct one. (6.53)
These paragraphs seem to

express perfectly the hard-liner

position of logical positivists. No surprise that the latter thought of
Wittgenstein as one of their own. However, certain puzzling state-
ments in the Tractatus created quite a bit of discomfort for the
members of the Vienna Circle. For example, in the preface Wittgen-
stein wrote, “The whole sense of this book might be summed up in the
following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly and what
we cannot talk about we must consign to silence.” Now, the posi-
tivists wanted to interpret Wittgenstein as saying here, “Metaphysi-
cians, shut up!” But Wittgenstein himself seemed curiously attracted
to what he called “the silence” and made further enigmatic allusions
to it. In paragraph 6.54 he wrote,
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who
understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he
has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to
speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up
it.) He must transcend these propositions and
then he will see the world aright.
It was here that Wittgenstein

was admitting that his own
propositions were nonsense,
but apparently a special
kind of higher nonsense.
What would higher
nonsense be like?
Wittgenstein continued:
How things are in the
world is a matter of
complete indifference
for what is higher. God
does not reveal himself
in the world. (6.432)
It is not how things
are in the world that is
mystical, but that it
exists. (6.44)

The solution to the enigma of life in space and time lies outside space
and time. (6.4312)
Slowly and in horror the truth dawned on the Vienna Circle.

Wittgenstein was a mystic! He was worse than the metaphysicians.
For a while, Wittgenstein
seemed satisfied with the
Tractatus. It had answered
all the philosophy questions
that could be sensibly asked.
As he had written:
“When the answer cannot be
put into words, neither can
the question be put into
words. The riddle does not
exist. If a question can be
framed at all, it is possible to
answer it” (6.5).
Wittgenstein dropped
out of philosophy. He went off into the villages of the Austrian Alps
as a primary schoolteacher. But he was not completely happy in his
new work, and his mind was not at rest. Russell spearheaded a move
to get Wittgenstein to return to Cambridge and to have the Tracta-
tus accepted as Wittgenstein’s doctoral dissertation. Wittgenstein
was given the professional chair of the retiring G. E. Moore, and much
excitement was generated over the fact that Wittgenstein had
returned to philosophy.
However, word soon got around that what Wittgenstein was now
saying about philosophy was not what had been expected of him. It
was not easy to know exactly what was going on, however, because
the eccentric Wittgenstein was very secretive about his new views
and he insisted that his students be so too. Nevertheless, some
mimeographed copies of notes from his lectures began to circulate. It
was not until after his death that his work from this period was pub-
lished as Philosophical Investigations. But long before the appearance
of that book, it had
become clear that a
major shift had taken
place in Wittgenstein’s
thinking. Both the posi-
tivism and the mysti-
cism of the Tractatus were
gone, for better or for worse.
Yet there continued to be
some common denominators
between the two works. Philosophy
was still seen as essentially the concern
with meaning, and it was still very much language-oriented. In the
Tractatus, Wittgenstein had written, “The limits of my language are
the limits of my world” (5.6). That view continued to hold in the Inves-
tigations, but language itself now seemed much less limited than it
had been in the earlier book.
Let us start our discussion of the Investigations with a look at
the problem of meaning. Throughout the history of philosophy, from
Plato to the Tractatus, the key model of meaning was that of deno-
tation, that is, of naming. Even where philosophers like Frege, Russell,
and the author of the Tractatus had distinguished between “refer-
ence” (denotation) and “sense,” the former was given priority. Accord-
ing to Wittgenstein, the historical prioritizing of naming as the key
feature of meaning had generated a certain kind of metaphysical pic-
ture that was pervasive in Western thought and that was in error.
Plato thought that words had to be names of things that existed
unchanging and eternally, and because there was no such thing in the
observable world, he developed his theory of the other-worldly Forms.
Aristotle thought words named something unchanging in the world,
namely, substances. In the medieval period, the nominalists also
thought of words as names but thought that they named nothing.
Their conclusion therefore was like that of the last sentence of Eco’s
novel The Name of the Rose, namely, “we have only names.” The empiri-

Names an act of Names an
Names the existence and
act of indefinite
attributes it class.
pointing at to an entity.
an entity.
Names the
class of
Canis
familiaris.
Names the class

of entities with spots
(including kids
with measles).
cists held that words named sense data and that any word not
doing so was suspect. The pragmatists thought that words named
actions, and the positivists, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein
thought they named atomic facts.
The later Wittgenstein broke completely with this tradition,
claiming that the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” 27
He wrote,
Think of the tools
in a tool box: there
is a hammer,
pliers, a saw, a
screwdriver, a
rule, a glue pot,
glue, nails and
screws.—The
functions of words
are as diverse as
the functions of these
objects. (And in both
cases there are similari-
ties.) . . . It is like looking
into the cabin of a loco-
motive. We see handles all

looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are supposed to be
handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved contin-
uously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of
a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on;
a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the
harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only
so long as it is moved to and fro. (11, 12)
So language, like tools or like the gadgets in the cabin of a loco-

motive, can get jobs done, and its meaning is found in the work it
accomplishes. Suppose two people are driving rapidly toward a cer-
tain destination, trying to arrive before sunset because the head-
lights are broken, and suppose the driver says, “Well, bad luck! The sun
just went down.” Now, what if the pas-
senger says, with a look of superior-
ity, “We now know that the sun
does not ‘go down,’ and that
the illusion that it
does is the result of
the earth turning
on its axis.” Does
what he said
mean anything?
No, because in
that context, it
gets no job done
(even though in
another context
that same sen-
tence would get a
job done). In fact,
there is something
mad about inserting this scientific fact into the context described.
There would also be something mad if the passenger, having found a
hammer in the glove compartment, began hitting the driver with it

and explained the action by saying “Hammers are for hitting.” Yes, but
not for hitting just any thing, any time, any place. And the same is
the case with language.
Still, a tool can serve a number of functions. In some contexts, a
hammer can serve as a weapon or as a paperweight. How about lan-
guage? Does it have only two uses, as the logical positivists sug-
gested (an expressive function and a representative function)?
Wittgenstein asked:
But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question,
and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds
of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,” “sentences.” And this multi-
plicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of lan-
guage, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and
others become obsolete and get forgotten. (23)
This comment brings up another feature of Wittgenstein’s the-

ory of meaning related to his claim that “the meaning is the use.” He
wrote, “The question ‘What is a word really?’ is analogous to ‘what is a
piece in chess?’ . . . Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role
in the game” (108). Wittgenstein generalized his claim when he called
any language a “language-game.” Let’s consider this point. All games
are rule-governed. The meaning of a piece (or a chip, or card, or mitt)
in the game is derived from its use according to the rules. What is a
pawn? A pawn is a piece that moves one square forward, except on its
first move, when it may move two squares. It may take the opponent’s
piece laterally and is converted to a queen if it reaches the opposite
side of the board. Similarly with words, phrases, and expressions—
they are rule-governed, and their meaning is derived from the use to
which they may be put according to the rules of the language game.
There are lots of kinds of rules determining language use: grammati-
cal rules, semantical rules, syntactical rules, and what could generally
be called rules of context. Some of these rules are very rigid, some are
very flexible, and some are negotiable. These variations are true in a
comparison of different games (the rules of chess are more rigid than

those of ring-around-the-rosy), or even
in a comparison within a game
(rules governing the pawn’s
moves are rigid, but those
governing the pawn’s size
are flexible). But even
flexible rules are rules,
and they can’t be bro-
ken without certain
consequences. When
some of the rules of a
given language game are
broken in subtle ways,
“language goes on holiday”
(38), as Wittgenstein said,
and one result is a certain kind of philosophy (as in the case of meta-
physicians), and another result is a certain kind of madness (as in
the case of Alice in Wonderland). The allusion to Alice is not gratu-
itous. The Alice books were among Wittgenstein’s favorites, no doubt
because they are compendiums of linguistic jokes showing the lunacy
that results when the function of certain features of language are
misunderstood. Think of the episode when the White King tells Alice
to look down the road and asks her if she sees anyone there. “I see
nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” responds
the king. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!” What
has gone wrong here? The joke is based on what some of Wittgen-
stein’s followers called a “category mistake”—the miscategorization
of certain linguistic facts and the drawing of absurd conclusions from
the miscategorization. (According to Gilbert Ryle, who coined the
term category mistake, this miscategorization was the error made
by Descartes that resulted in the mind-body problem. He had placed
“minds” in a similar category with bodies, making them “thinking
things”—ghostly, spiritual beings that somehow cohabitated with
physical beings, but no one could figure out how.)

Or consider the case of the White Queen, who promises to pay
her lady’s maid “Twopence a week, and jam every other day” but then
refuses to provide the jam on the grounds that it never is any other
day. Surely this is language gone on holiday.
What about the positivists’ search for the simplest constitu-

ents of reality on which to base the scientific edifice? Wittgenstein
asked,
But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is com-
posed?—What are the simple constituent parts of a chair?—The bits
of wood of which it is made? or the molecules, or the atoms?—“Sim-
ple” means: not composite. And here the point is: In what sense “com-
posite”? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the “simple
parts of a chair.” (47)
So much for the search for atomic facts.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had written, “Most of the propo-
sitions and questions of philosophy arise from our failure to under-
stand the logic of our language” (4.003). He still held more or less
the same view in the Investigations, but by then his conception of

“the logic of our language” had changed radically. It was no longer the
philosopher’s job to reveal the hidden logic behind language; rather, it
was to reveal the implicit logic of ordinary language (hence the term
“ordinary language philosophy”). Philosophers were to show that a
failure to grasp that implicit logic could result in “a bewitchment of
our intelligence by means of language” (109), and they were to show
that unwarranted tampering with our ordinary way of thinking and
talking about the world could produce a “linguistic holiday,” which gen-
erates the jokes that make up much of the history of philosophy.
Wittgenstein said, “[My aim in philosophy is] to show the fly the way
out of the fly bottle” (309). Apparently in Wittgenstein’s native
Vienna, a common flytrap was made by putting some honey in a
vinegar bottle.
The fly, traveling
on its merry way, would
smell the honey, deviate from its
path into the bottle, and either drown
in the sticky, sweet stuff or buzz to
death. For Wittgenstein, much of philos-
ophy was like that buzzing. To “show the
fly the way out of the fly bottle” was
not to solve philosophical problems
but to dissolve them by showing
that they are the result of
deviating from the path of
everyday language. This anal-
ogy illustrates the conserva-
tive side of Wittgenstein’s
thought. According to
him, “Philosophy can in
no way interfere with
the actual use of lan-
guage; it can in the
end only describe it.

For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything just
as it is” (124).
The apparent complacency here is reminiscent of G. E. Moore,
but the comparison, though good in some respects, is bad in others.
Wittgenstein’s mind was in constant turmoil and perplexity. There
was a brooding disquietude about the man and his thought that
belied the Vermeer-like bourgeois self-satisfaction of passages like
the one I just quoted.
Quine
The most important representative of the analytic tradition in the
second half of the twentieth century is probably Willard Van Orman
Quine, who was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1908. He went to Oberlin Col-
lege for a degree in mathematics,
and there he became fascinated
with Bertrand Russell’s mathe-
matical philosophy. He pursued the
topic in his doctoral dissertation
at Harvard under the direction of
Alfred North Whitehead. After
receiving his Ph.D., he visited
Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw on a
fellowship awarded him by the uni-
versity and was able to talk with
philosophers of the Vienna Circle
and with leading Eastern European
logicians. He returned to Harvard
and took up his career there as a
professor of philosophy. Even after
his retirement from Harvard at seventy years of age, he continued for
the next twenty years to give lectures and otherwise participate in
the philosophical profession.
Quine’s two most important books are From a Logical Point of
View (1953) and Word and Object (1960). Throughout most of the

rest of his work, he has taken the ideas presented in these two books
and tinkered with them, elaborating, modifying, and defending them.
In From a Logical Point of View Quine calls himself a pragmatist, so
some have placed him in the tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey,
but it is more generally agreed that he is best understood as
responding to the logical positivists with whom he had conversed in
Europe and, in his unique way, carrying out their program.
This categorization is in some ways surprising, because by 1960
most philosophers believed that logical positivism had bitten the
dust, in no small part due to Quine’s pair of silver bullets as repre-
sented by his 1951 article titled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
(included in From a Logical Point of View). The dogmas he attacks are
two of the positivists’ most dangerous weapons. The first dogma
Quine challenges is reductionism, the positivists’ attempt to reduce
each putative synthetic proposition to protocol sentences or confir-
mation sentences (check the Glossary if you don’t recall these
terms) and then to correlate these basic propositions with even

more basic, incorrigible sense-data experiences. Reductionism is a
main feature of the program of empiricism initiated by Locke, refined
by Berkeley and Hume, and touted triumphantly by the positivists as
the final nails in the coffin of religious, moral, and metaphysical dis-
course. Instead, this form of reductionism itself seems to have been
vanquished, at least in part because of Quine’s critique.
The second dogma that Quine targets is the analytic-synthetic
distinction (see pp. 183–184 and pp. 201–204 and p. 326). Quine
does not claim that there are no such things as analytic sentences
(“All bachelors are male” is a clear example of one) or synthetic sen-
tences (“Some dogs are spotted” is one such); rather, he tries to
demonstrate that ultimately the boundary between the two sup-
posed types cannot be drawn except arbitrarily. Take this sentence:
“Owls hoot.” Is it synthetic or analytic? It ought to be synthetic
because its negation does not lead to a self-contradiction. Yet our
certainty of the sentence “Owls hoot” seems greater than that of
the sentence “Owls are members of the order Strigiformes,” which
proves to be analytic. Similarly, sentences like “Strawberries are red
when ripe” or “Heavy objects fall when unsupported” seem to have at
least as much certainty as “Tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables”
(they are, you know!). Yet the first two examples would normally be
classified as synthetic
and the third as ana-
lytic. Quine is not saying
that it is impossible to
categorize these kinds of
sentences one way or
the other, but that ulti-
mately we do so only
arbitrarily and that this
arbitrariness rules out
the analytic-synthetic
distinction as one on
which we could rest much

philosophical weight—certainly not the amount that the logical posi-
tivists thought it could bear.
In fact, the real object of Quine’s attack is to demonstrate the
circularity of a whole cluster of philosophical views sacrosanct to
analytical philosophers. Characterizations of meaning were made in
terms of analyticity (that is, the nature of an analytic proposition),
analyticity in terms of synonymy, and synonymy in terms of meaning,
and so on forever, without managing to anchor any part of this sys-
tem outside the vicious circle that had been produced.28
One motive for Quine’s revision is his dislike of the positivists’
claim that mathematics is necessarily true but empty. He believes
that math has content and is not “necessarily” necessary. He does
not want to revert to Kant’s synthetic a priori to explain this con-
tent nor to Mill’s view of math as empirical generalization. Instead,
Quine develops a type of epistemological holism according to which
all parts of our system of knowledge are interrelated rather than
fragmented into different categories (categories like “the certainty
of sense data,” “the certainty but emptiness of analytic propo-
sitions,” “the uncertainty and probabilistic nature of synthetic
propositions,” “the meaningfulness guaranteed by verifiability,” “the
nonsense of metaphysics,” etc.). Quine defends the power of mathe-
matics in our systems of knowledge by saying that its strength lies
simply in “our determination to make revisions elsewhere instead.”29
If something went wrong with an experiment of ours, math would be
the last thing we would give up. Yet an extreme discrepancy between
our expectations and the data might make us more willing to con-
sider even the abandonment of math. After all, some features of
quantum mechanics, the most advanced stage of physical theory,
have suggested that we might have to abandon the law of the
excluded middle in logic.
Much to the horror of the few remaining logical positivists, Quine
admits that the dissolution of the synthetic-analytic distinction and
the abandonment of reductionism produce “a blurring of the sup-
posed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural sci-

ence.”30 You might think that this admission and Quine’s attack on
the two dogmas of positivism would establish him as an enemy of log-
ical positivism. But, in fact, Quine has remained sympathetic to the
spirit of the positivist program all his professional life. He believes
that responsible philosophy must be a form of empiricism, that it
must be scientific, and that it must defend materialism (or “physi-
calism,” as he calls it). From the latter point of view he concludes
that a form of behaviorism must be the correct answer to the mind-
body problem.
Quine’s theory of meaning follows the lead of Frege and Russell
in redirecting attention from words to sentences as the true units of
meaning. Hume’s empiricism was flawed because it made the mistake
of trying to correlate individual words with individual experiences.
(Take an idea like “God,” “cause,” or “self.” Hume asked: “From what
impression is that idea derived?” If he could find no sense datum cor-
responding to the idea, then the word naming the idea was meaning-
less.) On the contrary, by taking the sentence rather than the word
as the unit of meaning, Quine avoids Hume’s excessive reductionism,
and he escapes the opposite extreme, Platonism, as well. For Plato,
a word like “green” must name an essence, “greenness,” that is more
real than individual instantiations of greenness. This move violates
Ockham’s razor because items like “essences,” “meanings,” and
“Forms” become real things that must be accounted for ontologically.
Meanings become things that mediate between words and objects.
Quine writes, “The explanatory value of special and irreducible inter-
mediary entities called meanings is surely illusory.” 31
Quine makes great use of a technique that is now generally rec-
ognized as a hallmark of analytic philosophy—what he calls contex-
tual definition. It is a form of paraphrase in which sentences that
seem to provoke philosophical puzzles (for example, “Greenness is a
color”) are restated in ways that delete the offending terms (for
example, “Anything green is colored”). We have already seen this tech-
nique used to great effect in Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, whose
function was to deal with the verb “to be” in ways that relieved us of

the need to posit some metaphysical object called “being.” This
method of contextual definition reveals a suspicion on the part of
the philosophers who use it that ordinary language cannot represent
ideas in a successful manner and that therefore the philosopher
must be constantly alert against language’s deceptive snares.
(In this respect Quine is something like Wittgenstein, who wrote in
Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy is the battle against the
bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” [109]. The dif-
ference is that Wittgenstein did not suspect that ordinary language
itself is the culprit, rather, that the fault lies with our propensity to
saddle ordinary language with monolithic philosophical assumptions.)
Unlike Russell or the positivists, however, Quine uses contextual
definition pragmatically. He does not claim that it reveals the true,
hidden logical structure of thought disguised and burdened by ordi-
nary language. Rather, the convenience of contextual definition is
that it provides a way of bypassing certain features of ordinary
expression that appear to lead us into an overpopulated meta-
physical landscape. It also provides a language that can adequately
represent all scientific theorizing.
I should mention as an aside a common objection raised against
the method of paraphrasing in terms of contextual definition by
opponents of the type of analytic philosophy employed by Quine and
his tradition. They ask, how do we know that the elimination of the
metaphysical problem in the sentence replaced by the paraphrase is
not illusory? Perhaps the contextual definition simply disguises a
genuine philosophical truth about reality. Generally, philosophers who
raise this objection trust ordinary language more than does Quine.
Wittgenstein would probably be in this camp.
Despite Quine’s admission that the sometimes stilted language
of logical analysis could never replace ordinary discourse, for him only
the language of physics is capable of making literally true state-
ments about reality. This belief signals Quine’s physicalism—his
updated version of the old materialist thesis that there is only mat-
ter in motion, a view that we ran into first in Democritus and then

Original Problematic Contextual Translation
Sentence
I gave myself permission
to accept the opportunity
I got fired to explore new horizons
or . . .There is an entity
C, such that the sentence
“X is Y” (where Y equals
“auto-permissive, accepting,
opportunistic, and
horizontally explorative”)
is true if and only if
X = C. Moreover,
C is me
later in Hobbes. Ordinary language has instrumental value—it helps

us muddle our way through life—but it is not equipped to express
truths about reality, except sometimes in a metaphorical way. Quine
even seems suspicious of the status of the sciences other than
physics. Biology and psychology only give us another form of
metaphorical truth about what’s really there.
You might be surprised to discover that despite Quine’s physi-
calism, he is not a reductionist. He is unconvinced that sciences like
chemistry or biology can be reduced to physics or that all mental
states can be translated into neurological events. He is satisfied to
assert that “there is no mental difference without a physical differ-
ence.” 32 Apparently the ultimate facts about mental life are the kind
of facts that physics talks about, but at least for now—and per-
haps forever—there is no way of reducing descriptions of mental
events to descriptions of the most basic physical particles. Between
these two levels there seems to be a space that only metaphorical
language can fill. Yet Quine apparently thinks that this large space is
of no interest to philosophy.

To be or not
to be – that is BORING!
the question . . .
Philosophically,
that is . . .
It is not surprising that many contemporary analytic philoso-

phers who otherwise respect Quine for his rigor do not agree with him
on this topic. Some of them believe that this space to which Quine
is philosophically indifferent is the space of greatest interest to
thoughtful people, including philosophers, because it is constitutive
of human experience. It is in this space, for instance, that we find
activities and institutions like art, economics, morality, politics, lin-
guistics, and the experience of selfhood.
Related to Quine’s physicalism is a bold theory he produced in
1960 that he calls the “indeterminacy of translation” thesis. This
theory has proved to be one of his most controversial themes. Imag-
ine a team of field linguists trying to formulate manuals to allow
them to translate into English the unknown language of the subjects
among which they find themselves. We are to suppose that these lin-
guists have no access to any knowledge about the culture and insti-
tutions that have produced the language in question. The linguists
must concentrate on the relation between the verbal and bodily
behavior of the speakers and the physical stimuli that provoke these
behaviors. Quine believes that if these linguists work independently of

each other they will come up with a number of divergent manuals,
each of which will be incompatible with the other manuals, but all of
which could be compatible with the native speaker’s behavior—lin-
guistic and bodily—and the physical stimuli in the environment.
Because all these imaginary manuals are compatible with the physi-
cal facts (Quine’s main concern), there are no physical facts that
can determine which of the manuals is the correct manual. A manual
that facilitates conversation and cooperation is as correct as all
others that do the same thing. This conclusion constitutes a form of
radical behaviorism. If the same physical stimuli provoke the same re-
sponses, these responses are equivalent to one another.
Quine imagines that the linguists are trying to decipher the
expression “gavagai,” which the natives utter whenever a rabbit runs
by.33 Furthermore, whenever the linguists point to a rabbit while ask-
ing the question, “Gavagai?” the natives always make affirmative
gestures and sounds. According to Quine, in this case we can con-
clude that a correct translation of gavagai would be, “There is a rab-
bit over there.” But he also thinks numerous other translations
would be equally correct. In fact, Quine argues that in the situation
described, all these sentences are equivalent:
1. There is a rabbit over there.
2. A stage in the development of a rabbit is over there.
3. There are undetached rabbit parts over there.
4. There is rabbit-parts fusion over there.
5. There is an instantiation of rabbithood over there.
Contrary to most theories of meaning, which would say that sen-
tences 1 through 5 are not at all synonymous, Quine concludes that
because they are all systematically compatible with the same set of
physical stimuli, they are synonymous and that therefore an indeter-
minacy of translation is revealed.
Quine admits that translation 1 is the most likely way of read-
ing gavagai, but only for reasons of convenience, not reasons of
“truth.” His point is that from the perspective of bare physical fact

(especially elementary physical particles, etc.), each of these transla-
tions is as good as the others. According to Quine, if this indetermi-
nacy thesis rejects not only most philosophical accounts of language
and mind as well as our ordinary everyday conceptions of them, so be
it. Let the chips fall where they may. And certainly Quine’s theory
does wreak havoc with our normal ways of thinking about these top-
ics, so much so that his theory is vulnerable to the charge of being
outlandish. For example, a critic has pointed out that if you buy a
rabbit as a pet, Quine’s indeterminacy thesis turns your perfectly
acceptable wish to cuddle such a pet into the perverse desire to
fondle undetached rabbit parts.34 (I would add that the translation
of gavagai as “rabbit-parts fusion” would make the culinary term
“rabbit stew” a tautology.) Another critic suggests:
Many readers may feel that this
UMM, consequence of the indetermi-
undetached nacy thesis—apparently, the
rabbit . . . parts . . . overthrow of our everyday con-
ception of mind—shows that
something has gone wrong. It
may reinforce the feeling that
the focus on stimulus meanings
was unduly self-denying and was
bound to yield a distorted and
impoverished picture of meaning
and mind.35
Quine’s theory of the

indeterminacy of translation
has attracted much critical
attention. This attention is
not because philosophers feel
that the issue of translation itself is necessarily of central impor-
tance; rather, they believe that Quine is right to see his thesis as the
logical extension of radical physicalism, and by contesting the inde-
terminacy thesis they may be contesting physicalism itself.

At any rate, even philosophers who are opposed to Quine’s over-
all views find themselves influenced by a variety of arguments in his
widely read writings. There are probably few important analytic
philosophers on the contemporary scene who have not found them-
selves incorporating Quinean ideas into their own systems, or at
least feeling the need to respond publicly to his views. This list
includes names like Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky,
Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, Nelson Goodman, Wilfrid Sellars, Ian Hack-
ing, and John Searle, just to name a few. Also, the younger generation
of analytic philosophers has felt Quine’s continuing influence. Among
this group are some outstanding women philosophers, including Lynn
Hankinson Nelson and Louise Antony, who have argued that Quine’s
philosophy should be attractive to feminists.36
The Phenomenological Tradition

and Its Aftermath
Husserl
A number of European thinkers had continued to work well within the
Continental philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes despite
the unrelenting attack on that tradition by the logical positivists.
Primary among them was Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder
of a philosophy that he called “phenomenology” (from the Greek
phainómenon, meaning “appearance”—hence, the study of appear-
ances). He traced the roots of his view to the work of Descartes.
Like Descartes, Husserl placed consciousness at the center of all
philosophizing, but Husserl had learned from Kant that a theory of
consciousness must be as concerned with the form of consciousness
as with its content (Descartes had failed to realize this), so he de-
veloped a method that would demonstrate both the structure and
the content of the mind. This method would be purely descriptive and
not theoretical. That is, it would describe the way the world actually
The Phenomenological Tradition and Its Aftermath ◆ 353

reveals itself to consciousness without the aid of any theoretical con-
structs from either philosophy or science. This method laid bare the
world of what Husserl called “the natural standpoint,” which is pretty
much the everyday world as experienced unencumbered by the claims
of philosophy and science. Writing about the natural standpoint in
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl said,
I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time
becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first
of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through
sight, touch, hearing, etc., . . . corporeal things . . . are for me simply
there, . . . “present,” whether or not I pay them special attention.37
Skepti- The The The

cism World of World of Poultry
Rock Chemistry World
The World of The World of The World of The

Metaphysics Music Physics Computer World
The World of The World of The World of The World of
PHILOSOPHY ART SCIENCE BUSINESS
THE LIVED WORLD
Worlds upon Worlds
This world of the natural standpoint is the absolute beginning

of all philosophy and science. It is the world as actually lived. Other
worlds can be built upon the lived world but can never replace it or
undermine it. For human beings ultimately there is only the lived world
of the natural standpoint. But Husserl wanted to “get behind” the
content of the natural standpoint to reveal its structure. To do so,
he employed a method like Descartes’ radical doubt, a method that
Husserl called “phenomenological reduction” (or epochê, a Greek word
meaning “suspension of belief”). This method brackets any experience
whatsoever and describes it while suspending all presuppositions and
assumptions normally made about that experience. Bracketing the
experience of looking at a coffee cup, for instance, requires suspend-
ing the belief that the cup is for holding coffee and that its handle is

for grasping. Bracketing reveals the way the
cup presents itself to consciousness as a
number of possible structures. (I can’t
see the front and the back at the same
time, nor the top and the bottom, nor
see more than one of its possible pre-
sentations at any given moment.)
If we apply the epochê to the
more philosophically significant
example of the experience of time,
we must suspend all belief in clocks,
train schedules, and calendars.
Then we will discover that lived time
is always experienced as an eternal now, which is tempered by a mem-
ory of earlier nows (the thenness of the past) and is always rushing
into the semiexperienceable but ultimately nonexperienceable then-
ness of the future. Phenomenologically speaking, the time is always
“now.” To do anything is to do something now. You can never act then.
THEN
(the distant past THEN
semi-experienced (the near
future quasi-
through memory) experienced
ETERNITY
ETERNITY
through expecta-
tion) DEATH
HISTORY
(theoretically
experienced) THEN
THEN (the distant
(the immediate THEN future: quasi-
past semi- (the immediate experienced
experienced future semi- as mystery)
through the experienced
continuity of through antici-
thought and action) pation)
Similarly, a phenomenological reduction of the experience of

space reveals the difference between lived space and mapped space.
Lived space is always experienced in terms of a here-there dichotomy,
in which I am always here and everything else is always at different
intensities of thereness. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Husserl’s errant disciple,

would later draw very pessimistic conclusions from this discovery.)
So the here-now experience is the ground zero of the experience of
space and time. It is somehow the locus of the self.
One of Husserl’s main insights (actually derived from the work of
his teacher Franz von Brentano), and one that was to be incorpo-
rated into both the later phenomenological tradition and, in some
cases, the analytic tradition,38 was his treatment of the intentional-
ity of all consciousness (i.e., its referentiality). The Husserlian motto
here is “All consciousness is consciousness of . . .” (This motto means
there is no such thing as self-enclosed thought; one thinks about
something. You can’t be just aware —you have to be aware of some-
thing, and afraid of something, and concerned about something.
There are no intransitive mental states, not even Kierkegaard’s
“dread”—the fear of absolutely nothing. It is still the fear of nothing.)
It is this intentionality (or referentiality) that distinguishes con-
sciousness from everything else in the universe.
Husserl claimed that the phenomenological suspension could be
performed on the object of intentionality (e.g., the coffee cup) or on
the act of
conscious-
ness itself.
Therefore, he
believed it was
possible to step
back from normal
consciousness into a
kind of pure conscious-
ness, a transcendental
ego, a self-behind-the-self,
which, like Descartes’ “I am”
(but more deeply real), would be
the starting point of all knowl-
edge. Husserl’s ideas get very
complex here, and few of his disci-
ples have chosen to follow him into these ethereal regions.
Today, Husserl is most admired for his method. This method has
had a number of outstanding adherents, including Martin Heidegger,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. Shortly, we will review the philoso-
phies of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl’s best-known, if most way-
ward, disciples, and we will let them represent the outcome of the
evolution of phenomenology into existentialism.
Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was an early colleague of Husserl and
a student of his phenomenology, but it soon became clear that his
philosophical concerns were quite different from Husserl’s. The lat-
ter’s phenomenological reduction claimed to discover certain essen-
tial features of objects like coffee cups and matchboxes and to pro-
vide an account of our knowledge of these kinds of beings. Heidegger,
however, was interested in applying the method to a deeper ques-
tion—that of Being itself. He was not concerned with questions
about the nature of individual “beings” (questions that he called
“ontic” questions); rather, he
was interested in the Being of
beings—the fact that individual
beings are at all (what he called
“ontological” concerns). We saw
that Gottfried Leibniz in the
seventeenth century had asked
the primary ontological ques-
tion, “Why is there something
rather than nothing?” but he
had asked it only as a theologi-
cal query in order to prove the
existence of God. Furthermore,
by Leibniz’s time it was already too
late to ask the question correctly, Martin Heidegger
according to
Heidegger, for Being had already been
concealed in the Western tradition by
1,000 philosophical and scientific mis-
conceptions. But it had not always
been so. The pre-Socratics had
been astounded in the presence
of Being and had asked truly
ontological questions.
But these true thinkers
(thinkers are better than mere
philosophers, for Heidegger) were
followed by Plato, who distracted
thought away from Being and into an
artificial idealistic world of Forms,
and by Aristotle, who concentrated
on “beings” and provoked a techno-
logical tradition in which Being itself
would be forgotten. Heidegger wanted

to “call us back to a remembrance of Being”—to return us to our
primordial astonishment in its presence. We must come home to
Being—stand in its presence and establish a harmonic concordance
with it rather than merely intellectualize it.
One thing that prevents us from returning home to Being is the
language we employ to do it. It has become encrusted with the frag-
ments and dust of a ruined past, and it must be cleansed and
purged if it is to become a viable path to Being. Luckily (and quite
conveniently, if you are German, as was Heidegger), of the modern

languages, German is the closest to the truth, because it’s less
bespattered with lies and because it’s more powerful and more spiri-
tual than other languages—though ancient Greek, the language of
the pre-Socratics themselves, remains the most powerful. The Greek

of those first thinkers comes to us from a time when its speakers
were direct witnesses to Being.
Heidegger mined this language, going into its deepest etymolo-
gies. For instance, he discovered that the Greek word for “being,”
Parousia, designates something that “stands firmly by itself and
thus manifests and declares itself” 39and that the Greek word for
“truth,” aletheia, means “uncoveredness.”40 But simply studying Greek
or being able to speak German is not enough. A new beginning must be
found that will be radically innovative and return us to origins at the
same time. To this end, Heidegger generated a flood of technical
vocabulary, to the delight of some and the annoyance of others.

Take a look, for example, at one of his characterizations of the
meaning of the word “care”: “ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-
world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).” 41
(ten dashes already!)
It is not easy to see that these clumsy neologisms restore lost

meanings—that Heidegger’s artificial language is closer to the truth
than is the language of everyday life. It is ironic that Heidegger’s rea-
sons for rewriting ordinary language are in some ways similar to
those of Russell and the logical positivists. The latter created an
artificial syntax because they believed it was closer to the hidden
truth of language; Heidegger did so because he believed that it was
closer to the hidden truth of Being.
Humans have certain attitudes toward beings. In this respect,
we are like other animals. But unlike other animals, humans also have
an attitude toward Being itself. We “comport” ourselves toward it. We
are unique not simply because only we can question Being, but also in
that, in questioning Being, we put our own Being in question. We are
the only being whose own Being is a question for itself. Therefore, our
being is different. Heidegger designated that difference by saying

that other beings are; we ex-ist. He named human existence Dasein
(being there). Unlike other beings, which are merely in the world,
Dasein has a world. Heidegger rejected the intellectualism of most
philosophers who have seen the world as primarily the object of
human knowledge. For him, knowing was just one way of being-in-the-
world. Furthermore, knowing is itself not just an intellectual act.
To “understand” something is to understand it in the context of
usage, to understand it as something serviceable or dangerous.
Things are not just “present-at-hand”; they are not just objects for
disinterested scientific investigation; they are “ready-to-hand.” The
there of our being-there (Dasein) is filled with objects that are there
for us, ready-to-hand. We have care or concern for them. This “care”
(Sorge) is one of the main characteristics of human existence; we
care for the world around us, both the natural and the human world.
And when we express care not just for beings but for Being itself, we
are our most authentic selves as humans.
Being-within-the-world entails being-with-others. The there of
Dasein is populated not only with objects for our use but also with
the Dasein of others. Our relationship to others is neither that of
presence-at-hand nor readiness-to-hand, for we must acknowledge
that others make the same demands on us that we make on them.
There is a danger, however, of giving in too much to their demands.
We can “come not to be ourselves.” We can be sucked into the third-
person theyness of others. This form of inauthentic existence in
which we live in the opinions and desires of the anonymous they is a
form of fear that produces a hollowness. “Fallenness” is Heidegger’s
term for succumbing to this fear. Unfortunately, fallenness is not
just a side effect of bad choices. It is of the essence of human exis-
tence. We have “fallen” into a world of others. But it is possible to
come out of inauthenticity through Sorge: care for Being and care for
beings, care for the future, for the past, and for the community.
We are also rescued from inauthenticity through Angst, anxiety.
We experience anxiety in the recognition of death. This anxiety is not
the same as the simple fear of death. Anxiety is cognitive. It pro-

duces knowledge that
we are going to die. It
reveals to us that
Dasein is being-
toward-death. We
discover the mean-
ing of our being as
Dasein in the possi-
bility of not-being
Dasein, that is, in
death. It is also
this discovery that
reveals to us our own
freedom, for in the face
of our imminent annihila-
tion we must choose a life that justifies its own worth despite its
necessary termination.
Most of these ideas were developed in Heidegger’s major work
Being and Time, published in 1927. It contained two parts and ended
with a series of ques-
tions that Heidegger
promised to answer in a
third part. But Part 3
was never written. One
critic says that Heideg-
ger himself felt that
the path to Being had
“come to a dead end.” 42
After 1927, rather
than returning to the
unfinished section of
Being and Time, Heideg-
ger wrote a number of
Human Existence Is Being-toward-Death shorter works, some of

which still have not been released in an English translation. These
writings have provoked a great debate among both Heideggerians and
his critics as to whether Heidegger changed his mind after 1927 con-
cerning the key philosophical questions. There seems to be at least a
change of emphasis, in which language (the new path to Being)
almost eclipses Being, including the human being, as language swal-
lows up the individual. “Language is the house of Being in which man
ek-sists by dwelling.”43 It is not that humans speak language but
that language speaks itself through humans. It follows therefore that
poets rather than philosophers are the true custodians of Being—
and particularly the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who conve-
niently happened to be from Heidegger’s neck of the woods but who
inconveniently ended up in an asylum. The key feature of poetry is a

kind of naming, nomi-
nation, an act that
“realizes” in the sense
of making real. As in
Nietzsche, the Pla-
tonic hierarchy has
been inverted. It is the
artists and not the
scientists who speak
Truth. Eventually, in
Heidegger’s final
works, poetic language
itself seems to give
way to the poetic
silence between words. Truth would have to be “silence about silence.”
Despite the enormous influence of Heidegger’s philosophy, a
shadow has been cast over his life and his work. In 1933, as rector of
the University of Freiburg, Heidegger had joined the Nazi party and
had given speeches praising Adolf Hitler. Within a year, he resigned his
post and issued no more praise of the Führer. In fact, Heidegger him-
self came under the scrutiny of the Nazis. Yet he never publicly apolo-
gized for his support of a party that was soon to commit unimagin-
able atrocities, and he remained silent about the Holocaust. What is
the connection between his silence and the Silence that speaks
Truth? Apparently none. His critics say that his silence conceals a
sinister truth. They also claim to find a concordance between his
bombastic pseudointellectual German diction and his obsession with
death and land, on the one hand, and the ghoulish and vacuous ideas
of Nazism on the other. His defenders say that Heidegger was a
politically naive philosophical genius who made a political mistake and,
when he realized it was a mistake, made another by not publicly
denouncing his first mistake. They say this major personal flaw does
not detract from the value of his work.

Sartre
Another of Edmund Husserl’s erstwhile disciples was Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905–1980). Besides being one of the most important
philosophers of the twentieth century, Sartre was also an essayist,
novelist, and playwright.
His early philosophical
ideas are developed
in his novel Nausea
(1938); in his trea-
tises, Transcendence
of the Ego (1936) and
Being and Nothingness
(1943); and in his
essay “Existentialism
Is a Humanism”
(1946). In these
works, we see the
influence not only of
Husserl but also of Hei-
Jean-Paul Sartre
degger and Kierkegaard.
First, let us look at Sartre’s theory of consciousness. From
Husserl, Sartre had learned that consciousness is always referential,
in that it always refers beyond itself to an object. “Unreflected con-
sciousness” is consciousness before it is reflected upon or philoso-

phized about. When I read a novel, the object of the unreflected con-
sciousness is the hero of the novel. When I run to catch a trolley, the
object of the unreflected consciousness is “streetcar-to-be-caught.”
In unreflected conscious-
ness, there is no self,
no “I” to be found; only
its objects exist—Don
Quixote or the streetcar.
Reflective consciousness
is consciousness that
reflects on itself. Ac-
cording to Sartre (and
contrary to Descartes),
the ego, or the I, is to be discovered only in reflected consciousness.
Not only is it discovered there, but it also is actually partially cre-
ated there.
Once we study consciousness phenomenologically (bracket it,
make it the object of reflective consciousness), we discover that it is
“a monstrous . . . impersonal
spontaneity” 44 in which
thoughts come and go
at their will, not ours.
This spontaneity is a
form of dizzying free-
dom, according to
Sartre, and contem-
plation of it leads to
anguish. We actively
struggle to impose
order on this free
spontaneity, and when
we fail, neurosis and
psychosis ensue.

Sartre mentioned the case of a woman who dreaded her hus-
band’s leaving for work because she feared that upon his departure
she would sit nude in the window like a prostitute. Because she knew
she was free to do so, she feared she would do so. (This theme was
inspired by Kierkegaard’s account of dread. When God told Adam not
to eat the apple, Adam then knew that he could eat it—that he was
free to do so—and he knew that if he could, he might. That is, he
experienced his freedom as dread.)
In our own case, as in the case of that woman, sometimes the
order we impose upon consciousness breaks down, and conscious-
ness is revealed to us as the monstrous spontaneity that it is. As a
philosophical exercise, Husserl had suspended all beliefs and all “nor-
mality” in the epochê, but Sartre discovered that an epochê can
break in on us when we least expect it, not as a philosophical exercise
but as a crisis of consciousness, as when we look into a chasm and
suddenly feel the urge to throw ourselves in.

This crisis of consciousness is what happens to Roquentin, the
“hero” of Sartre’s novel Nausea, as he sits on a park bench looking at
the knotted roots of a chestnut tree.
Suddenly, all the old assumptions break down, and he sees the
tree not as a tree but as a “black, knotty, raw, doughy, melted, soft,
monstrous, naked, obscene, frightening lump of existence.” 45 Sud-
denly, the tree’s Being has presented itself to him. Roquentin discov-
ers that that Being, as it reveals itself in the crisis of consciousness,
is pure superfluity, pure excess.
The rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz were badly mistaken. Not
only is Being not necessary, but it also is absurd. Far from there
existing a “sufficient reason” for the being of Being, there is no reason
for it to exist at all. So the Sartrean existentialist finds his or her
own existence as a superfluity in an absurd world. Yet human beings
do exist. They have been thrown into a meaningless world without

their permission. What is the relation between human beings and
the world?
The most significant form of this relationship is that of “the
question.” By questioning the world, I reveal a nothingness in Being.
When I seek Pierre in a café and discover that Pierre is not there, I
reveal a nothingness in reality. (Pierre’s absence is real.)

In the same way, I discover that a nothingness separates me
from myself. There is a nothingness between me and my past (I am
not who I was) and between me and my future (the person I will be is
not who I am).

Thismm
realization
again makes
me aware that
“I await myself in
the future. Anguish
is the fear of not
finding myself there, of
no longer even wishing
to be there.” 46 This
anguish stems from my
discovery that my self is
not a stable, solid entity
that lasts through time;
rather, it is a creation that
I must make and remake
from moment to moment.
Not only must I create myself, but I must also create my world.
I do so by bestowing values on the world. According to the pre-
Sartrean view of freedom, values preexist my freedom. I am placed
between these values, and my freedom consists in my ability to

choose between these preexisting values. According to the Sartrean
view, through freedom, I bestow value on the world by choosing
aspects of it. Freedom preexists values. Life has no meaning or
value except that which I give to it. Ultimately, my choice of values
VALUE VALUE
A B
(Choose Me!)
(No, Choose Me!)
The Old View of Freedom
cannot be justified because there are no eternal (Platonic) values,

no stone tablets, no Scriptures to which I can appeal to justify my
choices. In the final analysis, no set of values is objectively any more
valuable than any other set. This discovery leads to more anguish
(of course!).
POSSIBLE VALUE
VALUE B
A
The Sartrean View of Freedom

“My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while
being itself without foundation.”47

Certainly my freedom is not absolute. Consciousness runs up
against “facticity” in existence (i.e., that which cannot be changed).
If a boulder falls in my path, I cannot change the fact that it is there
or that it is impenetrable. But I am free to interpret the meaning of
its “thereness” for me. It may mean an obstacle to be conquered, or

it may mean that my goal of reaching the mountain top is defeated,
or I may interpret it as an object of aesthetic contemplation or as a
scientific specimen. “Situation” is what Sartre called the interpreta-
tion of facticity. To interpret facticity is to create a world for me to

inhabit. I am always “in situation” and am always freely creating
worlds. In fact, in this respect . . .
“. . . I am condemned to be free.”48

Most people create worlds in “bad faith.” That is, rather than
facing up to their responsibility and freedom, people flee from them
by denying them or by blaming them on others, on fate, or on “the
Establishment.”
But there can be no blaming in good faith. We cannot blame our
upbringing, our parents, our poverty (or our wealth), or the “hard
times” because we alone determine the meaning that these things
have for us.
We are always free because there are always alternative

choices—the ultimate alternative is death. If I do not shoot myself,
then I have chosen whatever is the alternative to death.

A major complication in the experience of our freedom is that we
must encounter other free beings. The unity that I have imposed on
my consciousness is momentarily shattered when the Other looks at
me and transforms me into the object of his gaze. I can recover my
own selfhood only by looking at him and transforming him into my
object. (This is like Hegel’s master-slave relation, except that no syn-
thesis is possible.) “Hell,” said Sartre, “is other people.” 49
Sartre’s philosophy ends with what many philosophers take to

be a pessimism that reflects the plight of the human in the modern
world. Sartre denied that he was a pessimist. Instead, he made
heroes of us all. The authentic human being knows that all her acts
are ultimately futile in the face of death and the absurdity of exis-
tence, yet she chooses to persevere. In God-like fashion, she creates

worlds upon worlds. Like Sisyphus, she pushes her boulder daily up the
steep incline of existence, without excuse and without complaint. It is,
after all, her boulder. She created it.

Structuralism and Poststructuralism
Beginning in the 1960s, Europe’s fascination with phenomenology and
existentialism gave way to an interest in a new movement called
structuralism. This movement was in its inception a reaction against
phenomenology and existentialism; nevertheless, its members kept
returning to the themes raised by existential phenomenology.
Saussure
Although structuralism had a major influence on philosophy, it actu-
ally began in the social sciences and found its inspiration in the turn-
of-the-century work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913). In his posthumously published Course of General Lin-
guistics, agreeing with his contemporaries the pragmatists and
anticipating the view of the later Wittgenstein, Saussure argued that
“meanings” are neither names of fixed essences (as in rationalism)
nor names of sensorial experiences (as in empiricism). Rather, the
meaning of a linguistic phenomenon is a function of its location in an
underlying linguistic struc-
ture. This linguistic
object is not defined
by some positive fea-
ture inherent to it, but
rather in terms of the
negative relations in
which it stands to other
objects in the system.
(Both in terms of its
sound [phonic value]
and its meaning
[semantic value], the
word “bed” is what it
is by not being “bad,”
“bid,” “bod,” or “bud.”)

According to Saus-
sure, a language is a sys-
SIGNIFIER
tem of signs. A sign is a (Sound)
combination of a sound SIGN
(or an audio-image) and SIGNIFIED
an idea (or concept). The (Concept)
former is called a “signi- tant!
Impor
fier,” the latter a “signi-
fied.” (This terminological
distinction is germinal for
all structuralist thinkers.)
A sound can only be a sign
if it is related to a con-
cept. Therefore, there must be a system of conventions that relates
sounds to concepts. Saussure’s linguistics studies this system.
A major emphasis of Saussurean theory is on the arbitrary
nature of the sign. That is to say, the relation between the signifier
and the signified is a purely conventional one, not one based in
nature. The sound “cat” could have denoted the idea “dog,” but it just
didn’t turn out that way. There is no natural connection between the
sound “cat” and the
ideas we have of that
particular feline.
There are excep-
tions—so-called ono-
matopoeia. But even
these are usually more
arbitrary than they
seem. Dogs in California
say, “Bow-Wow”; but in
France they say, “Ouâ-
Ouâ”; and in Germany,
“Wau-Wau”; and in Italy,
“Bau-Bau.”
Structuralism and Poststructuralism ◆ 381

There is an anti-Platonic
philosophical implication in
this aspect of Saussurean
theory. The sign is arbitrary
at both ends. That is, there
are no absolutes at either
end. Both the signifier and
the signified evolve in relation
to other entities within their
audio-conceptual system
and in relation to other such
systems, which means that
there are no fixed universal
concepts. In that case, the Platonic ideal of absolute knowledge is
a myth.
So the signifier and the signified are both purely relational enti-
ties. They exist only insofar as they relate to other entities, and the
relationship is mainly a negative one. Saussure said of signs, “Their
most precise characteristic is being what the others are not.” 50
As Wittgenstein was to do later, Saussure drew an analogy
between language and chess. The shape of the chess piece is
arbitrary. Any shape will do as long as the piece can be distinguished

from other pieces with different functions. The identity of a chess
piece (or of a signifier, or of a signified, or of a sign) is not dependent
on some inherent essence that it has but is totally a function of dif-
ferences within the system to which it belongs. As Saussure said,
“there are only differences, without positive terms.”51
Lévi-Strauss
At the end of his work, Saussure called for a new science, the general
science of signs, which he named semiology, with linguistics as its
model, even though linguistics would be only part of this science. In
semiology, human conventions, rituals, and acts would be studied as
signs (combinations of signifiers and signifieds). These behavioral
signs would be demonstrated to be as arbitrary as linguistic signs
and would be shown to stand in the
same relationship to other parts of
the behavioral system that linguistic
signs do to language.
It is only a slight exaggeration
to say that structuralism is the
science that Saussure called for, a
science whose specific formulation is
the creation of the French anthropol-
ogist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908).
Most contemporary anthropol-
ogy is concerned with the orga-
nization of specific societies. It
tends to correspond to a form of
functionalism in that it often
explains social institutions and
phenomena in terms of their utilitarian value within the culture. (E.g.,
any nomadic desert tribes that became dependent on swine herding
would not survive. Therefore, the prohibition against eating the flesh

of pigs will become insti-
tutionalized in such soci-
eties. Hence “Jehovah’s”
and “Allah’s” prohibition
against pork.)
Lévi-Strauss rejects
the functionalist inter-
pretation of social phe-
nomena. Many social
institutions have no util-
ity at all in and of them-
selves but take on mean-
ing when related to all
the other institutions
within the society. Fur-
thermore, rather than
concerning himself exclu-
sively with the organiza-
tion of particular soci-
eties, Lévi-Strauss looks for universal characteristics of all societies.
All cultures, despite their many differences, are products of the
human brain. Therefore, “there must be somewhere beneath the sur-
face features common to all.” 52
The search for universals distinguishes Lévi-Strauss from the
mainstream functionalist movement and puts him in a philosophical
tradition that originated with Socrates and Plato (so Plato isn’t
completely dead after all!) and that is most clearly expressed in the
modern period by Kant’s search for synthetic a priori truths. What is
new in Lévi-Strauss is the claim that the human universals exist only
latently at the level of structure and not at the level of manifest
fact. (Though, of course, Marx and Freud said something similar. And,
indeed, Marx and Freud, as well as Saussure, have influenced struc-
turalism deeply.) When we look at Lévi-Strauss’s statement of his

method, we see the impact of Saussurean linguistics on his thought
because he treats cultural phenomena the way Saussure treated
signifiers.
1. “Define the phenomenon under study as a relation between

two or more terms, real or supposed.”
2. “Construct a table of possible permutations between these
terms.”
3. Treat the table as the structure of necessary logical connec-
tions (“a sort of periodic chart of chemical elements”), which
will demonstrate that the empirical phenomenon under study
“is only one possible combination among others.” 53

Notice two things here. First, Lévi-Strauss’s method is a ratio-
nalistic method (rationalistic because its goal is the discovery of
necessary logical relations, which are in fact a priori) in which empiri-
cal phenomena themselves are “demoted” and empiricism goes by the
board. Second, there is offered here a kind of halfway house between
freedom and determinism. There are choices, but they are severely
restricted for both individuals and cultures. These choices are at the
same time created and limited by the structural system of which
they are a part. Lévi-Strauss says, “human societies, like individual
human beings . . . never create absolutely; all they do is choose cer-
tain combinations from a repertory of ideas.” 54
In The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage, 1962), Lévi-Strauss
tries to demonstrate the essentially logical nature of all human
thought, including that of so-called primitives. The logical foundation
of all mental activity is the recognition of opposites, contrasts, and
similarities. In this sense, the “savage mind” (really, “thinking in the
raw”) is as rational as any other mind. Furthermore, it demonstrates
an exceptional awareness of the crude sensory data of nature and an
intuitive ability to detect analogous sys-
tems within the sensual vocabulary of
colors, sounds, smells, and tastes. Da-Da
Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage
Mind, tries to destroy once and for
all the myth ingrained in popular
prejudice and supported by Lévi-
Strauss’s anthropological prede-
cessors that primitives are like
children and think in some pre-adult
manner. He accomplishes this goal
with a two-edged argument. First,
he demonstrates areas of typical
primitive thinking that are far more
sophisticated than our own. Second,

he demonstrates examples of cultured thought that are in fact quite
primitive.
As an example of sophisticated thought among the primitives,
Lévi-Strauss tells us, concerning a tribe in the Philippines, that
Ninety-three percent of the total number of native plants are recog-
nized by the Hanunóo as culturally significant. . . . The Hanunóo clas-
sify all forms of the local avifauna into seventy-five categories. . . .
They distinguish about a dozen kinds of snakes . . . sixty-odd types of
fish . . . insect forms are grouped by the Hanunóo into a hundred and
eight name categories, including thirteen for ants and termites.55
??
Looks like
ants to
me.
. . . And that ’s a boodwaddle, and that ’s
a koodwaddle, and that ’s a doodwaddle, Seen one,
and that ’s a poodwaddle. you’ve seen
’em all.
Yup Yup
Yup
As an example of primitive thought among the “sophisticated,”

we need only consider our attitude toward such cultural icons as “the
bed in which George Washington slept,” or perhaps toward Madonna’s
bra, or the parchment that claims to be the U.S. Constitution. (It is

not. We would still have a constitution even if the parchment were
destroyed.) Many people treat these articles like primitive fetishes.
In summary, according to Lévi-Strauss, universally valid principles
of human thought hold for all peoples at all times. Historical and cul-
tural contingencies can overlay these principles with levels of abstrac-
tions and technical obfuscations, but these contingencies never
replace that which they disguise. To observe this universal logic in its
purest form, we should study the “unpolluted” mind of pretechnical
peoples. In such a way, we will discover the unity of the human race.
Lacan
By the end of the 1970s, structuralism itself began to give way to a
series of splinter groups that, opposed as they often were to one
another, can all be designated by the term “poststructuralism.”
This “movement” is not really an outright rejection of structural-
ism. It is, rather, a radicalization and intensification of some of its
themes. Like structuralism, it found its home not only in philosophy
but also in the social sciences, in psychoanalysis, and in literary
criticism. The bridge between structuralism and poststructuralism
was constructed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
(1901–1981), as seen in his dense and often perversely obscure book

Écrits. Yet Lacan claimed not to be
inventing a new theory or even rein-
terpreting the theories of Sigmund
Freud, the founder of psychoanaly-
sis, but simply to be reading Freud’s
text carefully (something he appar-
ently thought others had failed to
do). Undaunted by the fact that
neurology had failed to produce the
empirical evidence for psychoanaly-
sis that Freud had anticipated,
Lacan claimed to find its justifica-
tion in linguistics. Psychoanalysis is,
after all, “the talking cure.” It is
essentially about language. According to Lacan, “the unconscious is
structured like a language.”56 This epigram is an invitation to apply
the insights of linguistics to the study of the human mind.
There is, of course, such a thing as prelinguistic experience. It
gives the infant access to the Real, in all its Nietzschean disorder.
The Real is experienced as pain and joy, but the child’s access to lan-
guage alienates it from the Real. Organic need (what Freud called
“instinct,” or Trieb) is experienced as an aboriginal lack. As organic
need is translated into language,
it becomes desire, and the
original experience of lack
is cast into the uncon-
scious. Human exis-
tence is so hopelessly
insatiable because
underneath desire is a
radical lack of being. But
desire cannot address it
directly because desire is
language-bound.

Desire takes a metonymical course (“metonymy” refers to the
displacement of meaning from one signifier to another signifier that
is contiguous to the first, in terms of either meaning or sound; e.g.,
“He takes too much to the bottle,” or any rhyme: “cat, fat, mat”); it
moves from sign to tangential sign without ever being able to grasp
the absolute lack that it conceals. Lacan’s “desire is a metonymy”57
refers to this process. Desire is translated into demand, but demand
is not really concerned with any particular object because no particu-
lar object can replace the forever-lost object.
If we retrace the metonymical wan-
derings of true need (which has
been caught in the nets of the
signifier), we find that desire,
in its labyrinthine course,
ends up with itself as its
own object. Desire desires
desire. This is one meaning
of Lacan’s infamous phrase,
“Desire is the desire of the
Other.”58 Every desire is,
finally, the desire to be de-
sired by the Other, a desire

to impose oneself upon the Other. Ultimately, then, every demand is a
demand for love.
What have been repressed into the unconscious are not biologi-
cal instincts because these have already been translated into words.
It is words—signifiers—that have been consigned to the uncon-
scious. “The unconscious [is] a chain of signifiers.” 59 In conscious
language and thought, the emphasis is on the objectivity of the sig-
nified (i.e., the objectivity of meaning). This emphasis disguises the
creativity of the signifier (the word). It obscures and even denies the
Signifier . . . disguises the

creative possibility
The rigidity here signified here.
fact that the signifier can slide easily past its normal frontiers to
reveal amazing new relations between itself and its possible signi-
fieds. Unconscious language and thought know this truth, but the
institutional strictures of conscious thought and language (“the
discourse of reason,” or Logos) ignore this scandalous wisdom.
Conscious language uses conventional signs associated with fixed
meanings. It must do so; otherwise we wouldn’t understand each
other. But the unconscious is freed from the necessity of public
understanding. It can play with the signifier without regard for its
real meaning. It can produce its own private “meanings.” However,
there is a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious. That
bridge is poetry. Poetic language is close to a form of unconscious
language. It constitutes a kind of intermediary level between con-
scious and unconscious discourse. (“I should have been a pair of
ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”) 60
The poet hovers somewhere between the expressly public and the
intensely private. According to Lacan, the difference between the
patient and the poet is that the former’s poetic play with the rela-
tionships among signifiers is strictly private. The psychotic who

feared birds because he knew that, in French slang, police officers on
bicycles are referred to as “swallows,” lives in a purely private poetic
world. He does so because of an incommunicable personal experience
that he has suffered, an experience that can be traced in the uncon-
scious by following the network of signifiers in which his mind is
enmeshed.
DS
WOR RDS
WO
Silence: Poet at Work Silence: Lunatic at Work
What Lacan called the Imaginary designates the world of the

infant (and the world of some psychotics), a world in which the sub-
ject is lost in its own imagery, in its own fantasy. The “images” of the
Imaginary are representations of lived experience before that experi-
ence is alienated into language. We deliver ourselves from the entrap-
ment of the Imaginary by entering into the fullness of language, which
is to say, by entering into the Symbolic. By naming a thing, the sub-
ject distances herself from it. When she names it, she denies that
she is it. Access to the Symbolic fixates the mind and rescues it

from the undifferentiated flux
of the Imaginary. It mediates
between self and self, between
self and thing. If there were no
possibility of “registering one-
self in the Symbolic,” there
would be no possibility of indi-
viduality because individuality
requires differentiation.
Lacan was ambivalent con-
cerning the worth of the entry into
the symbolic order. On the positive
side, it is this access that makes individuality possible and that has
given the human its superiority
over nature. On the nega-
tive side, precisely by
alienating himself
from nature and
creating an uncon-
scious into which he
can suppress his
own natural self, the
individual becomes
more artificial, distanc-
ing himself from the truth of
his own reality, and enters into a system of rigid determinism. It is in
Lacan’s determinism that we see him at his most pessimistic.
When the subject gains access to the Symbolic, that individual
enters into a preestablished system with its own rules and struc-
tures. The self is assimilated into a network of relations in which the
self is always an effect and never a cause. The subject becomes fash-
ioned by the structure of language. The logic of the relations between
signs replaces the lived experience of the Real. The individual becomes

a prisoner of the autonomous order of signs. As in the later Heideg-
ger, it is not the subject but the language that speaks.
Derrida
Another important theorist in the Continental poststructuralist
movement (and one who came to teach philosophy in southern Cali-
fornia) is the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Well,
at least he was trained in philoso-
phy, but one of the hallmarks of his
view is the demotion of philosophy
from the privileged status it has
always claimed for itself as arbiter
of Reason. Traditional philosophy,
which Derrida derides as logocen-
trism, has devalued other forms of
writing, especially poetic, metaphori-
cal, and literary writing, as being fur-
ther from the Truth than is philo-
sophical discourse. Philosophy only
grudgingly uses language to express
its insights into meaning and reality.
Yet, according to Derrida, philosophi-
cal discourse suffers from the same
vicissitudes as every other form of speech and writing, and every
attempt even to say what one means by “meaning” and “reality”
must necessarily self-destruct.
So Derrida willingly plays twentieth-century Sophist to would-be
twentieth-century Platos. His version of relativism derives from a
radicalization of Saussure’s linguistics. If, as Saussure had argued,
every sign is what it is by not being the others, then every sign
involves every other sign. Therefore, there is never any “meaning” fully
present; rather, all meaning is infinitely deferred. (Derrida recognizes
that this conclusion is true of his own meaning as well—that his dis-

course is parasitical on the dis-
course that he criticizes—but
he accepts this paradox play-
fully, albeit a little too play-
fully for some of his critics.)
Every presence of
meaning or of being (be-
cause “being” can only pre-
sent itself in the context
of “meaning”) is an
absence, and every absence
is a presence. Derrida desig-
nates this fact of “surplus
meaning” as “différance,”
wittingly misspelling the
French word différence, pun-
ning on the fact that the
French verb différer means
both “to differ” and “to defer.”61
In fact, punning is very much to the point here. Derrida’s idea
can be partially understood by thinking of how almost all words have
multiple meanings. “Dog,” for instance, according to the Random
House Dictionary, can be correctly used to distinguish between
domestic canines, on the one hand, and wolves, jackals, and foxes on
the other, or it can include all these animals. It can designate the
male canine, as opposed to the bitch, or can include both. It can also
refer to “any of various animals resembling a dog.” It can designate “a
despicable man or youth,” an “ugly, boring, or crude girl or woman,” or
anybody in general, as in “a gay dog,” can refer to feet, or to “some-
thing worthless or of extremely poor quality.” It’s also the name of
“any of various mechanical devices for gripping or holding something,”
or it is a sausage, or the object of ruin (to go to the dogs), or of
unhappiness (a dog’s life), or as a verb, it can mean to track with hos-
tile intent, or to put on airs, and so on and so on.

If Derrida is right, the word “dog” cannot help but carry with it
some, or most, of these meanings in any of its uses. Every meaning
is, to use Freud’s language, “over-determined” (overloaded with signifi-
cance). If we say, “but the context determines the meaning,” we for-
get that the meaning also determines the context. (The English liter-
ary critic Terry Eagleton reminds us of the sign in the London subway:
“Dogs must be carried on the escalator.” And if I don’t own a dog,
may I not use the escalator?)
Because of this constant excess and slippage of meaning,

every text, philosophical or otherwise, ends up defeating the first
principles of its own logic, as Derrida tries to demonstrate: The
key philosophical dichotomies collapse in upon themselves, for exam-
ple, reality-appearance, being-nothingness, knowledge-ignorance,

certainty-doubt, theism-atheism, noumenon-phenomenon, fact-
value, reason-unreason, waking-dreaming. Or, to use Derrida’s lan-
guage, they “deconstruct” themselves. (His form of analysis is known
as deconstruction.) According to Derrida, the fact that all texts
self-destruct is really a fact about language, hence about human
thought. Yet every attempt to escape from “the prison-house of lan-
guage” is an avenue leading back to it. And because, as Heidegger
and Lacan pointed out, language creates the self (and not the other
way around, as was traditionally supposed), the self itself is decen-
tered and demoted under Derrida’s deconstructive gaze.

Irigaray
There are other important figures in the poststructuralist philosophi-
cal movement, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix
Guattari in France and Richard Rorty in America, but perhaps the in-
terest in the relation between language and selfhood has been most
doggedly pursued by certain women philosophers in France, notably
Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. These philosophers
are important, but not easy writers to read. Understanding them
requires a familiarity not just with philosophy but also with linguistics
and psychoanalysis. And readers must be prepared to decode dense
texts that are jungles of double meaning and eccentric syntax. Yet
these difficult texts are in fact examples of the kind of feminine writ-
ing their authors recommend as a way of deconstructing the Carte-
sian logos, which, according to them, is part of the mechanism of the
oppression of women. For that oppression is not merely to be found

empirically in the day-to-day workings of society, politics, and eco-
nomics, but it is manifested in the logos of social organization itself,
in the very act of producing meaning. That which is understood as
“real” is a social product resultant from a “symbolic order” (to use
the Lacanian phrase), and that order is “phallocentric,” that is to
say, constructed by men for their pleasure and advantage. If the
perception of reality is to be transformed in a liberating manner,
phallocentrism itself must be deconstructed. This negative act of
deconstruction must be accompanied by a positive act of creation—
Cixous and Irigaray call in various ways for the cre-
ation of a peculiarly feminine form of language
and writing. Despite this common goal, there
are significant divergences among these
philosophers. Here I concentrate on a sum-
mary of some of the ideas of Luce Irigaray,
whose background is in psycholinguistics
and who is a practicing psychoanalyst,
yet who presented herself for the presti-
gious doctorat d’État in philosophy be-
cause she felt that philosophy’s role as
master discourse needed to be ques-
tioned and disturbed precisely because
of its claim to be the pursuit of Truth.
As a psychoanalyst, Irigaray has
been deeply influenced by Freud and by the Lacanian reading of Freud.
But although she finds ammunition in Freudian theory for her
attempt to destabilize the logos of patriarchal discourse, she is dev-
astatingly critical of Freud’s own surrender to that same misogynis-
tic logic when it comes to his account of female sexuality. For Freud,
oddly, a person’s sexual history turns on an act of visual perception.
When the little girl sees that the naked little boy has an organ that
is missing to her, she believes that hers has been taken from her, and
she envies the boy that addition (penis envy). Because sexual differ-
ence depends on visibility and because in women there is nothing to

see (rien à voir), woman is defined as
a lack and is therefore outside
representation. Women are seen
as incomplete and inadequate
males. In her book Speculum of
the Other Woman (1974),
Irigaray sets out to disrupt
this absurd logic. The mean-
ing of the word “speculum”
is itself of interest. It origi-
nally meant “mirror,” but it
also refers to the medical
instrument used by gynecolo-
gists to examine the womb (and
hence alludes to a “spectator”).
Furthermore, it is associated with
the term “speculate” and is therefore related to the philosophical
enterprise itself.
Irigaray applies the first definition of the word “speculum” when
she points out that Descartes’ philosophy (whose analysis occupies
the middle of her book) shows the mind reflecting (and reflecting on)
its own being—a hollow, autistic echo chamber of sameness. Des-
cartes’ narcissistic speculations purport to be meditations on the
human condition but in fact are only meditations on the masculine
(phallic) thought process—one that is incapable of representing
woman as anything but the negative of its own reflection. In Irigaray’s
second definition, the (male) gynecologist’s speculum allows him to
gaze into the nothingness that is female sexuality, yet that instru-
ment is necessarily shaped like the vaginal passage itself. Hence, the
male gaze is after all determined by the feminine. Again, male philoso-
phers speculate, that is, they gaze—yet they are unable to represent
that which determines their gaze, the feminine other. (A woman privi-
leges not vision but touch, but because touch cannot be seen, it can-
not be reflected in the [male] mirroring mind.)

In Irigaray’s influ-
ential essay “This Sex
Which Is Not One,”
woman is characterized
as indefinable because
she is “decentered” and
“multiple.” Like Cixous
and Kristeva, Irigaray
believes that an account
of woman’s “difference”
must involve an investi-
gation of the feminine
unconscious. She does
not use Lacan’s phallic
symbolic realm as her
key category in this
analysis; rather, she
employs the Imaginary—
connected with the Freudian pre-oedipal relationship between mother
and daughter (usually marginalized in Freudian and Lacanian the-
ory)—where she finds a “difference” that is not simply the negative
mirror image of the male.
Irigaray’s account of le parler femme, or “womanspeak,” shows it
deriving from this pre-oedipal domain. Her first book, The Language
of Dementia (1973) is an investigation of the relation between the
demented speakers and the words they speak. This relationship is one
of alienation—a passive repetition of words and phrases that speak
themselves through the demented person, rather than that person
being a true speaker. Yet, according to Irigaray, this relationship is
very much the one that women find themselves in vis-à-vis phallocen-
tric discourse. So far, woman has needed either to remain silent or to
reenact the representation of herself as (literally) seen through men’s
eyes, that is to say, replicate a language that erases her. Irigaray
seeks a form of creative language, writing, and thought that is truly

woman’s—one that allows woman to represent herself, one that, like
the fluid elements of water and air that Irigaray equates with woman,
is “continuous, dilatable, viscous, conductive, diffusible, . . . [changing]
in volume or strength . . . according to the degree of heat.”62 That is,
one that is very much like the writing of Irigaray herself.
Topics for Consideration

1. Analyze the three following assertions, first from the perspective of
William James’s pragmatic theory of meaning and then from his theory
of truth:
A. The world is flat.
B. Reality is only a dream.
C. After your death, your soul will be directed to either heaven or hell,
depending on God’s judgment of your life.
2. What in general is the pragmatists’ idea of useless thought? What kind
of thinking is useful?
3. Write an essay in which you imagine G. E. Moore’s response to Des-
cartes’ claim that, in the absence of a proof of God’s existence, Des-
cartes cannot be certain that he has a body (see pages 165–167).

4. In your own words, describe what you take to be the point of Russell’s
Theory of Descriptions. What philosophical problems does he hope to
clear up with that theory?
5. According to the logical positivists, all assertions are either analytic,
synthetic, or nonsense. What function does this thesis have for the
logical positivists?
6. According to the text, what is the main weakness of the thesis of the
logical positivists that all assertions are either analytic, synthetic, or
nonsense?
7. What features of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus did the logical positivists
like, and what features did they dislike?
8. Contrast the later Wittgenstein (in Philosophical Investigations) with
the earlier Wittgenstein (in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) on the
topic of “nonsense.”
9. Explain what features of Quine’s philosophy would be repugnant to the
logical positivists and what features would be attractive to them.
10. Paraphrase Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” thesis as clearly as
you can, and then either defend it or attack it.
1 1. Choose an object, event, or experience on which you can perform a phe-
nomenological reduction (i.e., an epochê). First, write a description of
that object, event, or experience from the perspective of everyday life.
Then, after performing the epochê, write a report describing the same
object, event, or experience from the perspective of the phenomenologi-
cal reduction.
12. What do you suppose Heidegger means when he “calls us back to a
remembrance of Being”? What obstacles stand in the way of our
responding to this call, according to him?
13. Compare Heidegger and Sartre on the topic of our relations to other
people.
14. Kierkegaard has been called “the father of existentialism.” Write an
essay explaining how Kierkegaard, who is a radical Christian, and
Sartre, who is a radical atheist, can both be called existentialists.
15. Compare and contrast Lévi-Strauss’s theory of how the human mind
functions with the theory of mind developed by any other philosopher
who appeared in this book (e.g., Descartes, Locke, Kant).
16. Show the extent to which Saussure’s linguistic theory has influenced
Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction.
Topics for Consideration ◆ 403

Notes
1. Quoted in Morton White, The Age of Analysis (New York and Toronto: New Ameri-
can Library, 1955), 158.
2. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 28.
3. Ibid., 30.
4. Ibid., 34.
5. Ibid., 32.
6. Ibid., 97.
7. William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1979), 20.
8. James, Pragmatism, 15.
9. John Dewey, How We Think, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 8,
ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1986), 199–200.
10. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 7.
1 1. Dewey, How We Think, 195.
12. Bertrand Russell, “My Mental Development,” in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1946), 12.
13. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1927), 2.
14. G. E. Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” in G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, ed.
Thomas Baldwin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 111.
15. G. E. Moore, “An Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. Paul Arthur
Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1968), 14.
16. Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1988), 198. Hookway is speaking about W. V. Quine in
this passage, but it applies to Russell as well.
17. Bertrand Russell, “Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950,
ed. Robert Charles Marsh (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 341.
18. Ibid., 326.
19. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York and London:
Simon and Schuster, 1972), 831.
20. Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trub-
ner, 1935), 32.
21. Ibid., 31.
22. Moritz Schlick, “Causality in Everyday Life and in Recent Science,” in Knowledge
and Value: Introductory Readings in Philosophy, ed. Elmer Sprague and Paul W.
Taylor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 195, 206.
23. Carnap, 24.
24. Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952), 113.
25. Jon Wheatley, Prolegomena to Philosophy (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970),
103.
26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. Subsequent references

to this book appear in parentheses in the text, using Wittgenstein’s paragraph
numbering system rather than page numbers.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New
York: Macmillan, 1964), 6–7, par. 43. Subsequent references to this book appear
in parentheses in the text, using Wittgenstein’s paragraph numbering system
rather than page numbers.
28. Not all analytic philosophers agree that Quine has defused the synthetic-ana-
lytic distinction. See H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “In Defense of a Dogma,” Philo-
sophical Review 65 (1956): 141–58.
29. W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991):
270.
30. W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2d ed., rev.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 20.
31. Ibid., 12.
32. W. V. Quine, “Facts of the Matter,” in Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed.
R. W. Shahan and C. V. Swoyer (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979), 163.
33. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, 1960),
51 ff.
34. Peter Unger, Philosophical Relativity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 18.
35. Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1988), 141.
36. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows? From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); and Louise M. Antony, “Quine as
Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology,” in A Mind of One’s
Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Char-
lotte Witt (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).
37. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R.
Boyce Gibson (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), 91.
38. For a good example of treatment of intentionality by an analytic philosopher, see
John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983).
39. Martin Heidegger, quoted in George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (New York: Viking,
1979), 46.
40. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 265.
41. Ibid., 237.
42. Steiner, 114.
43. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn
Gray, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977), 213. The word “ek-sistence” is Heidegger’s revision of the word
“existence” in which he stresses the Greek etymology of standing out and relat-
ing existence to ecstasy (“ek-stasy,” stepping out of oneself).
44. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and
Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), 98–99.
45. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions,
1964), 127.
46. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Wash-
ington Square Press, 1992), 73.
Notes ◆ 405
47. Ibid., 76.
48. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” trans. Bernard Frechtman, in
Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel Press, 1990), 23.
49. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1948), 61.
50. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 117.
51. Ibid., 120.
52. Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana, 1970), 26.
53. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Neeham (Boston: Beacon Press,
1963), 16.
54. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum,
1964), 160.
55. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
Ltd. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 4. In this passage Lévi-Strauss
is quoting with approval a Yale University doctoral dissertation by H. C. Conklin.
56. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 20.
57. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton,
1982), 175.
58. Ibid., 264.
59. Ibid., 297.
60. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in The Waste Land and Other
Poems (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1962), 6.
61. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s explanation of the term “différance” in the
Translator’s Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), xliii–xliv.
62. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un [The sex which is not one] (Paris: Minuit,
1977), 109. Translated by Toril Moi for inclusion in her Sexual/Textual Politics:
Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 142.

Glossary of
Philosophical Terms
Boldfaced type indicates terms that are cross-referenced within the glossary.
accident In Greek and medieval logic, a characteristic of a substance that

is not essential to the substance. Rationality is part of the essence
of human beings, but being bald or hairy is accidental.
aesthetics The philosophy of art. The branch of philosophy that investi-
gates questions such as, What makes something a work of art? Are
there absolute values in art, or are aesthetic values always relative?
Can there be aesthetic arguments, or are aesthetic judgments based
only on preference? What is the status of art among other human
intellectual and creative endeavors?
alienation A term usually associated with Hegelian or Marxian philosophy,
designating the estrangement of a subject from its own essence or
the rupture between a subject and its natural object.
analogy A kind of comparison in which there is implied a similarity of sorts
between two otherwise differing objects. Analogy was claimed by many
Platonic medieval philosophers as one of the main sources of our knowl-
edge of God. For example, although we do not know God directly, we
know something about his mind based on an analogy between human
and divine wisdom.
analytic philosophy The view and practice according to which the main func-
tion of philosophy is the analysis of meaning rather than the construc-
tion of philosophical theories about the world. Analytical philosophers
believe that certain key concepts in ordinary language and in scientific,
moral, and religious discourse are philosophically vague or misleading.
Philosophical problems can be solved and pseudophilosophical problems
407
can be dispelled through the clarification of these concepts. The theo-
ries that analytic philosophers do generate tend to be demonstrations
of the logical relationships among these different realms of discourse
rather than grandiose metaphysical schemes. Although many of the
pioneers of this school at the end of the nineteenth century and begin-
ning of the twentieth century were Continental Europeans, the move-
ment has become primarily an Anglo-American one.
analytic proposition A proposition whose predicate is contained in its
subject (for example, “A triangle has three angles”; here the subject,
“triangle,” already entails the notions of “three” and of “angles”).
The negation of an analytic proposition always produces a self-
contradiction. Analytic propositions are contrasted with synthetic
propositions. The idea of analyticity plays a major role in the phi-
losophies of Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and the logical positivists. Quine’s
philosophy attempts to demote its significance.
anthropomorphism The projection of human qualities onto the nonhu-
man world.
a posteriori A belief, proposition, or argument is said to be a posteriori if
its truth can be established only through observation. Classical empiri-
cism was an attempt to show that all significant knowledge about the
world is based on a posteriori truths.
a priori A belief, proposition, or argument is said to be a priori if its truth
can be known independently of observation. Definitions, arithmetic, and
the principles of logic are usually held to be a priori. Classical rational-
ism was an attempt to show that all significant knowledge of the world
is based on a priori truths, which most of the rationalists associated
with innate ideas.
Arianism A fourth-century heresy named after its leader, Arius, who
denied the doctrine of the Trinity, holding that Christ had his own
essence, which was divine, but which was independent of God’s essence.
asceticism The religious or moral theory and its practice involving the
requirement that one eschew all luxuries and any material goods other
than the bare essentials.
atheism The claim that there is no God, or that there are no gods.
atomic facts A term of Bertrand Russell’s used by him and other analytic
philosophers to designate the most basic, simple facts out of which all
other facts could be constructed. These facts were “atomic” in the
original sense of the word, that is, indivisible. There was never consen-
sus over what “atomic facts” are exactly. Some analytic philosophers
408 ◆ Glossary of Philosophical Terms

decided that they were facts about sense data; others, that they were
literally physical facts.
atomism The view of Leucippus and Democritus that the whole of reality
is constructed out of invisible, indivisible, ultimate particles of being
that they called atoms. The splitting of the “atom” in the twentieth
century ended atomism. (The current atomic theory is not really a form
of atomism.)
axiology The general term for the theory of values. It incorporates
aesthetics and moral philosophy.
beatific vision, the A vision that bestows bliss, or extreme happiness, on
the individual who has the vision.
beg the question A fallacious form of reasoning—sometimes intentionally
so—in which the thesis that the argument is supposed to prove as its
conclusion has been smuggled into the argument’s premises (e.g., to
“prove” that murder is wrong, when the very word “murder” means
“wrongful killing”).
canon The documents or books declared to be central to the beliefs of any
religious, philosophical, or literary tradition by the authorities of that
tradition. For instance, the book of Genesis is canonical to Judaism
and to Christianity. The Gospel of Mark is canonical to Christians but
rejected by Jews.
Cartesian The adjectival form of René Descartes’ name. For example,
“Cartesian philosophy” is the philosophy of Descartes.
catharsis The purgation of dangerous emotions. In Aristotle’s philosophy
this act is accomplished through the active engagement with dramatic
art; in other theories it is accomplished by a cold shower.
causality The supposed relationship of necessity among events such that
whenever event X happens, event Y cannot fail to follow. In that case, it
is said that X causes Y.
conceptual analysis The logical and semantic analysis carried out by
analytic philosophers of concepts deemed to be philosophically prob-
lematical in order to resolve or dissolve the philosophical problems that
these concepts seem to entail.
conceptualism Abelard’s theory of universals, located somewhere between
nominalism and moderate realism, according to which concepts in the
mind are abstractions that the human mind makes from similarities
really existing in the natural world. As such, concepts are accurate but
not perfect representations of universals.
Glossary of Philosophical Terms ◆ 409

contingency Used in philosophy to designate the opposite of necessity.
In the sentence “This square is large,” the word “large” stands in a
contingent relation to the word “square,” whereas the word “angles” in
the sentence “This square has four right angles” stands in a necessary
relation to the word “square.”
cosmogony Theories or stories about the origins of the universe.
cosmological argument An a posteriori attempt to prove that God exists
by showing that his existence can be deduced from certain observable
facts in the universe. It was put forth by Maimonides and defended by
St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley, among
others. It was rejected by Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard.
cosmology Theories about the nature of the universe.
deconstruction The creation of the late French philosopher Jacques Der-
rida, based on his eccentric but provocative reading of the linguistic
theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Deconstruction is a theory of texts
(philosophical, fictional, legal, scientific), according to which, because of
the very nature of thought and language, almost all traditional texts
can be shown to “deconstruct” themselves, that is, to undermine and
refute their own theses.
deduction A form of argument in which the conclusion follows necessarily
from the premises.
determinism The view that every event that occurs, occurs necessarily.
Every event follows inevitably from the events that preceded it. There is
no randomness in reality; rather, all is law-governed. Freedom either
does not exist (hard determinism) or exists in such a way as to be
compatible with necessity (soft determinism).
deus ex machina A phoney solution. Literally “god from a machine.” Greek
dramatists of inferior quality would create complex plots loaded with
difficult problems, and then, with the use of a machine, drop a god onto
the stage (played by an actor on a cable) who solved the problems
supernaturally.
dialectic In the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, the dialectic is a mecha-
nism of change and progress in which every possible situation exists
only in relation to its own opposite. This relationship is one of both
antagonism and mutual dependency, but the antagonism (a form of
violence) eventually undermines the relationship and overthrows it.
(However, sometimes the term “dialectical” is used only to emphasize
a relationship of reciprocity between two entities or processes.)

doctrine of the double truth A medieval theory attributed to Averroës
and developed by the Latin Averroists, according to which there exist
side by side two categories of truth: revealed (religious) truth and
philosophical (scientific) truth. These two kinds of truth do not com-
pete with each other even where they appear to contradict each other;
they simply offer discrepant perspectives on the same object. Whether
a cynical theory, as some believed, or an insight into the nature of
truth, as others believed, for a short time it allowed progress in the
investigation of topics that otherwise might have been banned by reli-
gious authorities.
doctrine of the Trinity An official Christian dogma asserting the unity of
the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit)
in one divine Godhead.
dogma The principal tenets of a religious system as determined and
enforced by the authorities. The word has also acquired a pejorative
sense, referring to fossilized beliefs held tenaciously and uncritically.
Donatism A fourth-century heresy named after its founder, Donatus, who
held that sacraments were invalid if the ministering priest was in a
serious state of sin.
dualism The ontological view that reality is composed of two distinct
kinds of beings, usually (as in Descartes) minds and bodies.
empiricism The epistemological view that true knowledge is derived pri-
marily from sense experience (or, in “purer” strains of empiricism, exclu-
sively from sense experience). For empiricist philosophers, all significant
knowledge is a posteriori, and a priori knowledge is either nonexistent
or tautological. The “classical” empiricists were the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Britons—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—all of whom
denied the existence of innate ideas and conceived of the human mind
as a “blank slate” at birth.
entropy The hypothetical tendency for systems to achieve a state of max-
imum equilibrium through reduction of tension.
epistemology Theory of knowledge; answering questions such as, What is
knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? What is the difference
between opinion and knowledge?
eschatology The study of last, or final, things. In theology, the study of
death, or of the Last Judgment, or of the end of the world.
essence That feature of an object or concept that establishes the nature
and definition of the object or concept. For example, Aristotle said that

rationality is the essence of human beings, and even though the ability
to laugh or to blush is unique among humans, neither ability is part of
the human essence.
ethics Moral philosophy; the branch of philosophy that answers questions
such as, Is there such a thing as the Good? What is “the good life”? Is
there such a thing as absolute duty? Are valid moral arguments possi-
ble? Are moral judgments based only on preference?
etymology The study of the origins and histories of words.
evolution As used here, the transformation over time of one species of
natural living being into another species.
existentialism A twentieth-century philosophy associated principally with
Jean-Paul Sartre but also thought to encompass the work of Karl
Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others. More of a shared atti-
tude than a school of thought, it can nevertheless be roughly defined by
saying with Sartre that existentialists are those who believe that, in
the case of humans, “existence precedes essence.” This is the thesis
that there is no human nature that precedes our presence in the world.
All humans individually create humanity at every moment through their
free acts.
false consciousness A term in Marxian philosophy, originating with
Friedrich Engels, designating the psychological state of mind of mem-
bers of a society dominated by ideology.
Forms Usually associated with the philosophies of Plato or Aristotle. For
Plato (in whose philosophy the word “Form” is capitalized in this text),
everything that exists in the physical or conceptual world is in some
way dependent on Forms, which exist independently of the world but are
the models (essences, universals, archetypes) of all reality. Forms are
eternal and unchangeable and the ultimate object of all true philoso-
phizing. For Aristotle, forms are also the essences of things, but they
exist in things and are not independent of them. The form of an object
and its function are ultimately related.
freedom Freedom exists if there are such things as free acts and free
agents, that is, if some acts are performed in such a way that the
authors of those acts could be held responsible for them. Some
philosophers (called libertarians) say that these acts do exist, that
some acts are freely chosen from among genuine alternatives, and that
therefore determinism is false. (“I did X, but under exactly the same
circumstances, I could have done Y instead. Therefore, X was a free

act.”) Other philosophers (called soft determinists) also say that free
acts exist but define “free acts” not in terms of genuine alternative
choices but in terms of voluntary acts. (“I wanted to do X, and I did do
X; therefore X was a free act.”) Still other philosophers (called hard
determinists), while agreeing with the definition of “free act” given by
libertarians, deny that any such free acts or agents exist.
functionalism The view in anthropology that socially acceptable behaviors
and institutions can be explained by showing that they have survival
value for their society.
hedonism Either the view that pleasure and pain should be the only
motives for correct action (called moral hedonism, defended by Epicu-
rus and Bentham) or the view that pleasure and pain are the only
motives for voluntary action (called psychological hedonism, or psycho-
logical egoism, defended by Hobbes).
holism The view that the parts of a system are not independent, discrete
units; rather, they are what they are by virtue of their relationship to
one another and to the whole system.
idealism The ontological view that, ultimately, every existing thing can be
shown to be spiritual, mental, or otherwise incorporeal (hence, a version
of monism); usually associated in Western philosophy with Berkeley
and Hegel.
ideology A term in Marxian philosophy designating the status of cultural
phenomena (such as art, religion, morality, and philosophy) as systems
of propaganda supporting a specific socioeconomic system and its
beneficiaries.
innate idea An idea or a concept that is present at birth.
incorrigibility An empirical statement has incorrigibility if a person who
believes it could not be wrong. An example might be, “I feel pain now,”
uttered in a case in which one in fact does feel intense pain. Whether
such statements actually exist is controversial, but empiricism in its
classical form (Locke) and modern form (logical positivism) put great
stock in them.
induction A form of argumentation in which, unlike in deduction, the con-
clusion does not follow necessarily from the premises. Instead, the con-
clusion makes a claim that is broader than the claim found in any one
of the premises or in the totality of the premises. For example, this
swan is white; that swan is white; all of those swans are white; there-
fore all (or most) swans are white. The conclusion of an inductive argu-
ment usually stands in a probabilistic relation to the premises.

law of identity See principle of identity.
law of noncontradiction See principle of noncontradiction.
law of the excluded middle See principle of the excluded middle.
logic The branch of philosophy that studies the structure of valid infer-
ence; a purely formal discipline, interested in the structure of argumen-
tation rather than in its content.
logical positivism A development within analytical philosophy initiated in
Austria and Germany between the two World Wars by scientifically
minded philosophers and philosophically minded scientists as a reac-
tion against what they took to be the overblown metaphysical grand-
standing of European philosophers in the nineteenth century. Their goal
was to make philosophy respectable by making it scientific. Philosophy
would be restricted to logical analysis whose outcome would be the
demonstration that the only truly meaningful propositions are those
of mathematics, logic, and science. All others would be shown to be
merely poetic, emotive, analogical, or nonsense.
Manicheanism A religious system asserting the domination of reality by
two opposing irreducible supernatural forces, Good and Evil.
materialism The ontological view that, in the final analysis, all phenomena
can be demonstrated to be material in nature and that mental and
spiritual phenomena are either nonexistent or have no existence inde-
pendent of matter (e.g., as in Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, and Quine).
mechanism A theory claiming that the whole of reality is like a machine.
Reality is made up of material objects in motion or at rest, standing in
direct causal relationships with one another, requiring no explanation
other than the laws of Newtonian physics.
metaphysics The branch of philosophy that attempts to construct a gen-
eral, speculative worldview; a complete, systematic account of all reality
and experience, usually involving an epistemology, an ontology, an
ethics, and an aesthetics. (The adjective “metaphysical” is often
employed to stress the speculative, as opposed to the scientific, or
commonsensical, features of the theory or proposition it describes.)
metempsychosis The passage of the soul at the death of the body into
the newly born body of another creature, human or animal. The belief in
such a transmigration of souls is held in several philosophical and reli-
gious systems.
misogyny The hatred of women.
moderate realism An aspect of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of mind and lan-
guage, related to Abelard’s conceptualism, espousing the Aristotelian

view that essences are not separate from the physical world—as in
Plato and Platonic realism—rather, they are embedded in natural
objects. The human mind is capable of abstracting these essences from
the natural world, along with other general characteristics, thereby
forming the universals, which are accurate representations of these
similarities that exist in the real world.
monad Term from Leibnizian metaphysics designating the simplest, most
basic substance, which Leibniz took to be a unit of psychical energy
that is both nonphysical and nonspatial, yet from which all physical and
spatial objects are derived—perhaps in the way that neither hydrogen
nor oxygen is liquid, yet two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen
produce liquid.
monism The ontological view that only one entity exists (e.g., as in
Spinoza) or that only one kind of entity exists (e.g., as in Hobbes and
Berkeley).
moral philosophy See ethics.
mysticism The view that reality reveals its true nature only in a superra-
tional ecstatic vision.
naive realism The view, attributed both to unsophisticated persons and to
certain philosophers who defend a commonsense picture of the world,
that reality is pretty much the way it appears to our senses.
naturalism As employed in this text, naturalism is the epistemological
view that a natural phenomenon can be explained only by references to
other natural phenomena; or ontological view that all is nature, that
there are no supernatural or unnatural phenomena, and that there is
no natural hierarchy of value. For example, humans are no more valuable
per se than coyotes.
necessary condition A component, feature, or state of any object or
idea X that must be present before the object or idea can correctly be
designated as X, and whose absence guarantees that an object or idea
is not an X. For example, oxygen is a necessary condition of combustion.
Some necessary conditions are also sufficient conditions. Life is both
a necessary and a sufficient condition of any organic system. Divisibility
by two is a necessary and sufficient condition of an even number. Divisi-
bility by four is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of evenness.
necessity (1) Logical necessity: There is a relation of logical necessity
(or logical entailment) between two propositions if the assertion of
one of them, together with the denial of the other, results in a contra-
diction. For example, there is a relation of logical necessity between

the sentences “Linda is a sister” and “Linda has at least one sibling”
because the assertion of the one and the denial of the other would
result in a contradiction. (2) Ontological necessity: There is a relation
of ontological necessity between two events X and Y if the occurrence
of the first event X must be followed by the second event Y. (Deter-
minism claims that every event is necessary; i.e., every event follows
necessarily from the events preceding it. Indeterminism claims that
not all events are necessary.)
nihilism Either the view that nothing exists or the view that nothing
deserves to exist, or the wish for destruction.
nominalism The theory of language and mind claiming that the universals
do not name independent Forms, essences, or general similarities that
truly exist in the natural world. Rather, they are mere names designat-
ing convenient categorizations of the world for pragmatic human inter-
action with it. In the medieval world, nominalism (such as that of
William of Ockham) was meant as a form of empiricism. In the more
radical modern versions (such as Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s), nominal-
ism is a skeptical doctrine, implying that what the human mind knows
is not a real, natural world, but rather a world of convention created
arbitrarily.
noumenal world Kant’s name designating ultimate reality—the forever
unknowable but necessarily existent reality behind the phenomenal
world, or the world of appearance. Phenomena are in fact appearances
of noumena.
numerology The study of numbers in order to reveal their supposed eso-
teric or mystical meanings.
ontological argument An a priori attempt to prove that God exists by
showing that, from the very concept of God, his existence can be
deduced. This argument has been defended by a number of religious
philosophers in the Platonic tradition. It was first formulated by St.
Anselm and appears in one form or another in the work of Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel. It has some able contemporary defenders,
for example, Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm. But it has been
rejected by some notables too, including St. Thomas, Hume, Kant, and
Kierkegaard.
ontology Theory of being; the branch of philosophy pursuing such questions
as, What is real? What is the difference between appearance and real-
ity? What is the relation between minds and bodies? Are numbers and
concepts real, or are only physical objects real?

pantheism The view that everything is divine, that God’s “creation” is in
fact identical with God: from the Greek pan (“all”) and theos (“god”).
patriarchy Literally, rule by the father. Generally, any system in which polit-
ical power is essentially in the hands of older males.
Pelagianism A religious view named after its founder, Pelagius, declared
heretical by early medieval Christianity. It denied original sin and,
according to Church authorities, overemphasized the role of free will in
achieving salvation.
phallocentrism In the theory of psychoanalysis, the phallus is the symbol
of male sexual power. Phallocentrism is the belief that such power is or
should be dominant in culture.
philology The study of ancient written records, usually of “dead” languages.
Platonic realism The medieval Platonic theory of language and mind that
claimed that the universals denote real essences and other general
characteristics. Indeed, essences (Forms) are more real than the phys-
ical objects in which they are instantiated.
Platonism A theory basing itself on any of these interrelated ideas in
Plato’s philosophy: the idea that the intellectual or spiritual world is
more real than the physical world, which is a mere copy of that superior
world; the idea that essences are not merely abstractions but exist
eternally as Forms; the idea of reality as a hierarchy of dependencies,
each less real than that upon which it is dependent.
pluralism The ontological view that reality is composed of a plurality of
beings rather than just of one kind of being (monism) or of two kinds of
beings (dualism).
polytheism The view that more than one god exists.
pragmatism An American philosophical movement developing around the
turn of the nineteenth century whose goal was to show that both
meaning and truth should be defined in terms of a practical relation
between thought and language on the one hand and the natural and
social worlds on the other. Language and thought were conceived as
problem-solving devices, and philosophical theories, like other ideas,
were evaluated exclusively in terms of their instrumentality.
pre-oedipal A term in psychoanalysis referring to the time in the child’s
life before the oedipal period. The oedipal period is when the child begins
to develop an erotic attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and
a jealous antagonism to the parent of the same sex.

principle of identity Claimed to be one of the three basic laws of
thought, this principle states that everything is identical to itself:
Fido is Fido; A = A.
principle of internal harmony An axiom governing reality that Gottfried
Leibniz deduces from God’s rationality, power, and goodness, according
to which God created reality in such a way that it exhibits the greatest
amount of perfection possible (“the best of all possible worlds”). There-
fore, we must assume that the relationships among all created beings
are as harmonious as possible, even in situations in which there
appears to be conflict.
principle of noncontradiction Claimed to be one of the three basic laws of
thought, this principle states that it is not the case that something
both is and is not A at the same time (where A is any identity or char-
acteristic): it is not the case that Fido is brown all over and not brown
all over; ~(A . ~A).
principle of sufficient reason A foundational idea in the philosophy of
Gottfried Leibniz and others asserting the rational structure of both
thought and reality and the concordance between them. For any being
that exists, there is some reason—known or as yet unknown—explain-
ing why it exists and why it exists as it does. Leibniz claims that any-
one who denies the principle of sufficient reason—such as some
mystics—is irrational by definition.
principle of the excluded middle Claimed to be one of the three basic laws
of thought, this principle states that, given anything in the world, it is
either A, or not-A (where A is any identity or characteristic): Either
Fido is brown all over or Fido is not brown all over; A v ~A.
Priscillianism A fifth-century heresy concerning the doctrine of the
Trinity—that is, the relation between God the Father, his son, Jesus,
and the Holy Ghost—originated by a Spanish bishop, Priscillian, and
attacked by St. Augustine in his book Ad Orosium, contra Priscillia-
nistas et Origenistas.
proper name As used in association with Gottlob Frege’s theory of mean-
ing, a noun or noun phrase that designates individual people, places, or
objects, apparently without regard to any descriptive component, for
example, Sacramento, George Washington, the White House, the Capi-
tol. Proper names are contrasted in grammar with general descriptions
and with common names, like “horse” and “triangle,” which can desig-
nate whole classes of objects. Notice, however, that a noun phrase like
“the highest mountain in California” can be a proper name if it serves as

a synonym for “Mount Whitney,” or it can be a description, as in “Which
peak in that mountain range would you say is the highest mountain in
California?”
proposition As employed in this text, a proposition is whatever is
asserted by a sentence. The sentences “It’s raining,” “Es regnet,” and
“Llueve” all assert the same proposition.
psychoanalysis The theory created by Sigmund Freud (1859–1939) con-
cerning the causes of repressed wishes and fantasies in the uncon-
scious mind and the relation of these unconscious motives to the
conscious mind and to normal and abnormal behavior in general. Also,
the psychotherapy associated with that theory.
psychological atomism The view held by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (though
not named as such by them) that all knowledge is built up from simple,
discrete psychological data, such as the primitive sensorial experiences
of colors, sounds, and tastes. (See also sense data.)
psychological egoism The view that the goal of all motivation is to achieve
a benefit for oneself. This doctrine rules out altruism as a possible
motivation unless that altruism is conceived by the moral agent as
being in his or her own self-interest.
quantum mechanics A theory in advanced physics about the nature of
atoms and subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, or neutrons
that asserts that the behavior of these entities cannot be explained in
terms of nineteenth-century mechanistic physics nor in terms of tra-
ditional theories of causality.
randomness If there are events that are totally uncaused and in principle
unpredictable, then those events are random events. If there is random-
ness (i.e., if random events exist), then determinism is false.
rationalism The epistemological view that true knowledge is derived pri-
marily from “reason” (or exclusively from “reason,” in the purer strains
of rationalism). Reason is conceived as the working of the mind on
material provided by the mind itself. In most versions, this material
takes the form of innate ideas. Therefore, for the rationalists, a priori
knowledge is the most important kind of knowledge. In rationalistic
ontologies, the mind and the world are seen to be in conformity—the
real is the rational. The classical rationalists were the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Continental philosophers Descartes, Spinoza,
and Leibniz, but the concept is broad enough to include such philoso-
phers as Parmenides, Plato, and Hegel.

realism The philosophical doctrine that a real material world exists and is
accessible by means of the senses, or that the invisible entities named
in physics, such as atoms and electrons, are real and not simply con-
structs of the human mind. (Not to be confused with Platonic realism.)
reductionism The project of trying to demonstrate that all apparently
complex levels of reality can be shown to be reducible to simpler, more
basic levels, for example, the attempt to show that all physical objects
can be explained as atomic structures or that all mental events can be
explained as neurological events.
reification The result of illegitimately concretizing that which is abstract,
that which is general, or that which defies concretization. From the
Latin, res (thing), hence, to “thingify.”
relativism In ethics and aesthetics, relativism is the view that there are
no absolute values; all values are relative to time, place, and culture. In
epistemology, relativism is the view that there are no absolute truths;
all truths are relative to time, place, and culture.
scholasticism The name given to the philosophy practiced in the “schools”
of the medieval universities, where all branches of philosophy, logic, and
linguistics were developed and systematized according to theological
schemata.
semiology (sometimes called semiotics) The study of the system of signs.
A “sign” is an arbitrary mark or sound that has become imbued with
meaning by virtue of its membership in a system of conventionality.
Language is the most obvious case of such a system of signs, but
behaviors and rituals can also be studied semiologically.
sense data That which is perceived immediately by any one of the senses
prior to interpretation by the mind. Sense data include the perceptions
of colors, sounds, tastes, odors, tactile sensations, pleasures, and
pains. Classical empiricism based itself on the supposedly epistemo-
logically foundational nature of sense data.
set theory The branch of mathematics that defines its numerical objects
in terms of sets (for example, “even number” as the set of all numbers
divisible by two) and establishes the logical relations among sets.
skepticism (or scepticism) A denial of the possibility of knowledge. Gen-
eral skepticism denies the possibility of any knowledge; however, one can
be skeptical about specific fields of inquiry (e.g., metaphysics) or spe-
cific faculties (e.g., sense perception) without denying the possibility of
knowledge in general.

solipsism The view that the only true knowledge one can possess is knowl-
edge of one’s own consciousness. According to solipsism, there is no
good reason to believe that anything exists other than oneself.
sophism (1) The doctrines of a group of teachers in fifth-century-B.C.E.
Athenian democracy who espoused relativism against epistemological
and ethical absolutism and who emphasized rhetoric over reason in
argumentation. (2) Sometimes a derogatory term designating a form
of deceptive argumentation.
structuralism Based on the philosophical anthropology of the contempo-
rary French theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss (but also finding followers in
all the human sciences), structuralism is the view that the human mind
is universal in that, everywhere and in every historical epoch, the mind is
structured in such a way as to process its data in terms of certain
general formulas that give meaning to those mental data.
subjectivism The view that there are no objective truths or values; all
truths and values are relative to the subjectivity of the individual.
(Subjectivism is a version of relativism.)
sublimation A term usually associated with Freud, but employed earlier by
Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, naming the process of refinement
or of spiritualization whereby the more base and crass elements are
transformed into more subtle or sublime elements; for example, the
sexual or aggressive drives are transformed into art.
substance In philosophy, “substance” has traditionally been the term nam-
ing whatever is thought to be the most basic, independent reality. Aris-
totle defined a substance as whatever can exist independently of other
things, so that a horse or a man (Aristotle’s examples) can exist inde-
pendently, but the color of the horse or the size of the man cannot. The
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists took the idea of sub-
stance as independent being so seriously that one of their members,
Spinoza, claimed there could be only one substance in the world (i.e.,
only one thing), namely, God, because only God could exist indepen-
dently. Under Berkeley’s criticism of material substance and Hume’s
criticism of spiritual substance, the concept of substance was very
much eroded away. It turned up again in Kant, but only as a category of
knowledge, not as a basic reality itself.
sufficient condition A component, feature, or state of any object or idea X
that, if present, guarantees that the object is indeed an X. For example,
fire is a sufficient condition for heat, but it is not a necessary condi-
tion. (Heat can be generated without fire.) Sometimes a condition is

both necessary and sufficient. Life is both a necessary and a sufficient
condition of any organic system. Divisibility by two is a necessary and
sufficient condition of an even number. Divisibility by four is a sufficient
but not a necessary condition of evenness.
synthetic proposition A proposition that can be either true or false and
that asserts factual claims about reality. The negation of synthetic
propositions, unlike for analytic propositions, does not produce self-
contradiction (“The cat is on the mat” and “The cat is not on the mat”
are both possible factual claims about reality). The empiricists hold
that synthetic propositions are always a posteriori; that is, they can
be verified or refuted only through observation. By contrast, Kant held
that synthetic a priori propositions are possible.
teleology A teleological explanation is an explanation in terms of goals,
purposes, or intentions (from the Greek telos, meaning “goal”). For
example, “John closed the window because he didn’t want his budgie to
escape” is a teleological explanation because it explains John’s behavior
in terms of his intentions.
theology The systematic study of God and his properties, from the Greek
theos (“God”) and logos (“theory,” or “study of”).
universals A term in medieval theory of language designating common
names like “redness,” “quickness,” “animality,” “mammality,” “wealth,” and
“humanity.” The status of the universals was hotly debated throughout
the Middle Ages, producing theories such as Platonic realism, moder-
ate realism, conceptualism, and nominalism.

Selected Bibliography
Includes primary sources (some of the original works of the main philoso-
phers discussed in this book) and secondary sources (some suggestions for
further study) as well as a few personal comments concerning some of the
books recommended.
Wherever possible, inexpensive paperback editions are cited.
General Histories of Western Philosophy

Copleston, Frederick, S. J. A History of Philosophy, in nine vols., now gath-
ered in three books (New York: Doubleday, 1985). The author’s biases
are evident, but this work is a “must” for serious research.
Jones, W. T. A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed., in five vols. (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969). Many long passages from the
philosophers, clear presentation, and reasoned discussion.
Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1945). This eminent philosopher’s biases balance out those
of Copleston. Beautifully written.
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Primary Sources
Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
Pertinent selections with commentary.
Nahm, Milton, ed. Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962).
Wheelwright, Philip, ed. The Presocratics (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966).
It’s good to have several anthologies of the fragments of the pre-
Socratic philosophers in order to compare translations.
423
Secondary Sources
Ring, Merrill. Beginning with the Pre-Socratics (Mountain View, Calif.: May-
field, 1987). A short, well-written commentary on the fragments.
Taylor, C. C. W., ed. From the Beginning to Plato. Vol. 1 of Routledge History
of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1977). Composed of
chapters on the pre-Socratics, each written by a different expert
from the perspective of the most recent scholarship in the field. Not
directed primarily to the beginning student, but usually accessible.
Get this work and the rest of the Routledge History of Philosophy
from the library.
The Athenian Period

Primary Sources
Aristotle. The Basic Work of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York:
Random House, 1941). This is the main text for all serious students of
Aristotle’s philosophy.
Plato. Great Dialogues of Plato, translated by W. H. D. Rouse and edited
by E. H. Warmington and P. G. Rouse (New York: New American Library,
1956). Contains the Republic, “Apology,” “Crito,” “Meno,” and “The
Symposium,” among others. This is only one of many inexpensive paper-
back editions now available.
Plato. The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic
Books, 1968). Perhaps the most accurate and literal translation
(but therefore not the most readable).
Secondary Sources
Adler, Mortimer J. Aristotle for Everybody (New York: Bantam Books, 1985).
A readable, enticing defense of Aristotle’s views by a real Aristotelian.
Barnes, Jonathan. Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press [Past Mas-
ters series], 1982). Almost all the books in this series are good,
cheap, short, and readable.
Barrett, Harold. The Sophists (Novato, Calif.: Chandler and Sharp, 1987).
A short, spirited defense of the views of the Sophists.
Murdoch, Iris. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978). The author is both a foremost
novelist and a top-rate philosopher.
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York:
Bantam Books, 1982). A (mostly) fascinating contemporary personal
investigation of the problem of value that obsessed the Sophists,
Socrates, and Plato. Pirsig sides with the Sophists and repairs his
Harley.
Stone, I. F. The Trial of Socrates (New York: Doubleday [Anchor Books],
1989). Wonderful depiction of Athenian political life at the time of
424 ◆ Selected Bibliography

Socrates. Annoyingly simplistic criticism of Socratic and Platonic
philosophy.
Vlastos, Gregory, ed. The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical
Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). A fine sampling of schol-
arly work about Socrates.
The Hellenistic Period

Primary Sources
Hadas, Moses, ed. Essential Works of Stoicism (New York: Bantam Books,
1961). Contains Marcus Aurelius’s “To Himself,” Epictetus’s “The
Manual,” and Seneca’s “On Tranquility.”
Oats, Whitney J., ed. The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: Epicurus,
Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius (New York: Modern Library,
1940). A standard source book.
Plotinus. The Six Enneads, translated by S. MacKenna and B. S. Page
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).
Medieval Philosophy
Primary Sources
Fremantle, Anne, ed. The Age of Belief (New York: New American Library,
1954). This is the first of “The Age of . . .” series. These books are
short anthologies of works from the period treated. Each selection
is preceded by a brief introductory essay. Very helpful.
Hyman, Arthur, and James T. Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages:
The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1974). Excellent samplings of the work of the main medieval philoso-
phers, including selections from Augustine, Eriugena, Anselm, and
Thomas Aquinas.
Secondary Sources
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (New
York: Warner Books, 1984). A best-selling philosophical novel by a
medieval scholar. (You get a mean murder mystery as well.)
Gilson, Etienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New
York: Random House, 1955). By one of the great students of the
medieval mind.
Kenny, Anthony. Aquinas (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980). This is in the Past
Masters series, which are short, usually insightful accounts directed
to introductory students.
Luscombe, David. Medieval Thought (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997). A short, expert, up-to-date discussion of the topic.
Selected Bibliography ◆ 425

Price, Betsy B. Medieval Thought: An Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Black-
well, 1992). Particularly good in relating philosophy to the rest of cul-
ture in the Middle Ages.
Renaissance Philosophy
Primary Sources
Cassirer, Ernst, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr., eds. The
Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1948). An excellent selection of works by a number of Renaissance
philosophers, with good introductory essays.
Santillana, Giorgio de, ed. The Age of Adventure: The Renaissance Philoso-
phers (New York: George Braziller, 1957). The second in the fine “The
Age of . . .” series.
Secondary Sources
Parkinson, G. H. R., ed. The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rational-
ism. Vol. 4 of Routledge History of Philosophy (London and New York:
Routledge, 1993). The first half contains a sampling of contemporary
scholarship on the subject.
Schmitt, Charles B., ed. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A large
collection of essays by specialists in the field of Renaissance intellec-
tual history. Get this one at the library.
Thomas, Keith, ed. Renaissance Thinkers (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993). A collection of four short books originally
published in the Past Masters series. Includes Erasmus by James
McConica, Bacon by Anthony Quinton, More by Anthony Kenny, and
Montaigne by Peter Burke.
Continental Rationalism
and British Empiricism
Primary Sources
Berkeley, George. Philosophical Works (London: Dent [Everyman’s Library],
1992). See especially Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Very readable.
Berlin, Isaiah, ed. The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers (New York: George Braziller, 1957).
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations, translated by
L. J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill [The Library of Liberal Arts],
1960).
Descartes, René. A Guided Tour of René Descartes’ Meditations on First
Philosophy, edited by Christopher Biffle and translated by Ronald

Rubin (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1989). Annotated with ques-
tions in the margins for students.
Descartes, R., B. Spinoza, G. Leibniz. The Rationalists (New York: Doubleday
[Anchor Books], 1960). An excellent anthology selected from the key
works of these philosophers.
Hampshire, Stuart, ed. The Age of Reason: The Seventeenth-Century
Philosophers (New York: George Braziller, 1957).
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
Hume, David. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1993).
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Classics, 1984).
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn
(London: Dent [Everyman’s Library], 1991).
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by
Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976).
Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill [The Library of Liberal Arts], 1950). Difficult but much
more accessible than The Critique of Pure Reason.
Leibniz, Gottfried W. Philosophical Writings, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson
(London: Dent [Everyman’s Library], 1990). See especially “Discourse
on Metaphysics” and “Monadology.”
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Dent
[Everyman’s Library], 1991).
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government (New York: Hafner, 1964).
Locke, J., G. Berkeley, D. Hume. The Empiricists (New York: Doubleday
[Anchor Books], 1961). The companion to The Rationalists.
Spinoza, Benedict de. On the Improvement of the Understanding, The
Ethics, and Correspondence, translated by R. H. M. Elwes (New York:
Dover Books, 1955). See especially The Ethics. (Benedict is the
latinized version of Baruch, his real name.)
Secondary Sources
Ayer, A. J. Hume (New York: Hill and Wang [Past Masters series], 1980).
Hampshire, Stuart. Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought
(New York: Penguin Books, 1992). Very readable; written by an excellent
philosopher.
Martin, C. B., and D. M. Armstrong, eds. Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday [Anchor Books], 1968).
A good selection of scholarly studies.
Scruton, Roger. Kant (New York: Oxford University Press [Past Masters
series], 1989).

Warnock, G. J. Berkeley (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953). Still one of my
favorites.
Post-Kantian British
and Continental Philosophy
Primary Sources
Aiken, Henry D., ed. The Age of Ideology: The Nineteenth-Century Philoso-
phers (New York: George Braziller, 1957).
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie (New
York: Harper and Row [Torchbooks], 1967). Will look impressive on your
shelf, but not recommended for the casual reader.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair Hannay
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985). A fascinating little book.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics
and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
[Anchor Books], 1989).
Mill, J. S. On Liberty and Utilitarianism (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and edited
by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968). See especially
The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of
Morals.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Holling-
dale (New York: Penguin Books, 1969). The students’ favorite.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea, translated by R. B. Hal-
dane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). Big and
imposing but surprisingly readable.
Secondary Sources
Barrett, William. Irrational Man (New York: Doubleday [Anchor Books],
1990). Classical work on existentialism. See chapters on Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche. Also good for twentieth-century figures.
Fromm, Erich. Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederich Ungar, 1969).
Contains philosophical essays by the early Marx and a long essay by
Fromm. Both very good.
Kojève, Alexander. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on “The
Phenomenology of Spirit,” translated by James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca,
N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). A very influential, bril-
liant, but quirky interpretation of Hegel that makes the connection
between him and Marx closer than it is usually thought to be.
Mooney, Edward. Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s
“Fear and Trembling” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
A fine little book by a friend of mine. Buy it; he can use the money.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol. 2, Hegel and Marx
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). Sir Karl was a fore-
most philosopher of science. This book is a very interesting and very
biased account of Hegel and Marx, blaming them for just about every-
thing that has gone wrong since their time (except those things that
Popper had already blamed on Plato in Volume 1).
Rius. Marx for Beginners (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Cartoons and text by
one of Mexico’s leading political cartoonists.
Safranski, Rüdiger. Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). A good way to break
into the strange world of nineteenth-century German philosophy.
Singer, Peter. Marx (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press [Past Masters
series], 1983).
Westphal, Merold. History and Truth in Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1990). You’ll need a guide to Hegel’s
work. This one’s good.
Pragmatism, the Analytic Tradition, and the

Phenomenological Tradition and Its Aftermath
Primary Sources
Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, n.d.).
This short book is the student’s best approach to logical positivism.
Be careful Sir Alfred doesn’t convert you!
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Not easy!
Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty (New York: Putnam [Capricorn
Books], 1960).
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,
translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1969).
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
James, William. Pragmatism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961).
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1977). Ouch!
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind, translated by George Wiedenfeld
and Nicolson Ltd. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Triste Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primi-
tive Studies in Brazil, translated by John Russell (New York:
Atheneum, 1964).

Moore, George Edward. G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, edited by Thomas
Baldwin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See especially
“A Defence of Common Sense.”
Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View, 2d ed., rev. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1961).
Quine, W. V. Word and Object (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons,
1960).
Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1992).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions, translated by
Hazel Barnes and Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1990).
Start here.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Robert
Denoon Cumming (New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 1972).
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade
Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
Weitz, Morris, ed. Twentieth-Century Philosophers: The Analytic Tradition
(New York: Free Press, 1966). Representative selections from Moore,
Russell, the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, and ordinary language
philosophers.
White, Morton, ed. The Age of Analysis: The Twentieth-Century Philosophers
(New York: George Braziller, 1957).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., translated by
G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F.
Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
Secondary Sources
Archard, David. Consciousness and the Unconscious (La Salle, Ill.: Open
Court, 1984). This comes as close to an “easy access” to Lacan as
I’ve found.
Castaneda, Carlos. Journey to Ixtlán (New York: Pocket Book, 1975). An
unusual introduction to the idea of phenomenology. Somewhere
between anthropology, philosophy, and fantasy.
Danto, Arthur C. Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking Press [Modern Masters
series], 1975). Great!
Dreyfus, Hubert. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being
and Time, Division I” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). The best
guide to Being and Time.

Duffy, Bruce. The World as I Found It (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988).
A good novel about G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
Hookway, Christopher. Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). Quine is tough, but this book
is a big help.
Leach, Edmund. Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989).
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York:
Methuen, 1986). Good chapters on Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.
Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin
Books, 1990). An excellent biography with philosophical summaries.
Norris, Christopher. Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1987).
Passmore, John. Recent Philosophers (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985).
Good, clear account covering philosophical developments up to the
early 1980s.
Pears, David. Wittgenstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
[Modern Masters series], 1971).
Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger (New York: Viking Press, 1979). A sensible
introduction to difficult stuff.

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Index
a posteriori arguments, 138 Schofield on, 20

a priori arguments, 121 on universe, 20
mathematic synthetic, 291 Anaximenes, 22–24
synthetic, 214, 215, 217 on condensation and rarefaction, 23
a priori truth, Kant on, 212 Angelico, Fra, 147
Abelard, Peter, conceptualism of, 133 angels, Aquinas on, 136
Abraham, Kierkegaard on, 257 anguish, 372
the Absolute, 100 animate world, 39
absurdity, of Being, 369 Anselm of Canterbury, 118–121, 126, 168
the Academy, 59 Gaunilon and, 120
accidents, Aristotle on, 76 on God, 118–119
Achilles, 5 anthropomorphisms, Nietzsche on,
act, being and, 134 275–276
Acton, Lord, 269 Antipodes, 114
aesthetics, 63, 71 Antony, Louise, 353
defined, 7 anxiety, Heidegger on, 362–363
Africa, 4 apeiron. See the Boundless
alienation, Marx on, 263–264 aphorism, 27–28
American Revolution, 195 apocalypse, 131
analogical meaning, Aquinas on, 135 Aquinas, Thomas, 118, 124, 126
analytic philosophy. See also atomic on act and being, 134–135
facts; logical positivism on analogical meaning, 135
development of, 290 on angels, 136
of Frege, 288–289 on Aristotle, 131–132, 134, 135, 139
analytical geometry, 154 cosmological arguments of, 137
Anaxagoras, 38–41 on ethics, 138–139
Aristotle on, 40–41 five ways of, 137
infinite seeds of, 38–39 on happiness, 139
on Nous, 39–40 on natural law, 139–140
Socrates on, 40–41 on philosophy v. theology, 133–134
Anaximander, 16–22 scholasticism of, 141
books of, 18–19 on soul, 135
on the Boundless, 17–20 works of, 132
433
Aquinas, Thomas (continued) Bain, Alexander, 299
areté. See virtue Battle of Tours, 122
Arianism, 110 Beatific Vision, 139
aristocracy, 84 Beauty, 66–67
Aristophanes, 43–44 Becoming, 230
Aristotle, 11, 12, 72–87, 123, 125, 148 Bedeutung, Frege on, 295–296
on Anaxagoras, 40–41 Beethoven, 245
Aquinas on, 131–132, 134, 135, 139 begging the question, 208–209
on art, 85–87 Begriffschift (Frege), 291
on democracy, 84–85 Being
elitism of, 80–81 absurdity of, 369
on essences and accidents, 76 act and, 134
on form and matter, 74–75 Aquinas on, 134–135
on four causes, 77–78 Hegel on, 230
on government, 84 Heidegger on, 357–358, 361–362
on happiness, 79–80, 82 Nothingness and, 230, 370–371
humanism and, 149–150 Parmenides on, 32
influence of, 87 Pure, 229
on law, 83–84 Sartre on, 369–370
moral philosophy of, 79–80 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 366
Plato and, 72–75, 129 Being and Time (Heidegger), 363–364
political theory of, 83 Belief, 299
on Prime Mover, 78 Conjecture and, 64
principles of logic of, 247 Kant on, 218–219
on slavery, 85 Bentham, Jeremy, 280–285
on soul, 135 on calculus of felicity, 284–285
on substance, 75–76 on happiness, 282
on virtue, 81–82 on hedonism, 281–282
art, 70–71 Kant and, 282
Aristotle on, 85–87 on pleasure, 282–283
Plato on, 85–86 Berkeley, George, 196–200, 227, 300,
in Renaissance, 147 345
ascete, 96 empiricism of, 196
atheism, defined, 7 on God, 199–200
Athenian philosophers, 48–87 on knowledge, 198–199
atomic facts, 333. See also analytic on qualities, 197
philosophy on representative realism, 200
atomism on substance, 198
defined, 41 Bessarion, Cardinal, 151
Democritus and, 41–42 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 271
psychological, 196 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 94
Augustine of Hippo, 108–113, 110, 145 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 271
on God, 110–112 Black Plague, 146
influence of, 112–113 Boethius, 113, 128, 332
on Neoplatonism, 108–109 books, 11–12
on universals, 128 the Boundless, Anaximander on, 17–20
Averroés, 123–124 Bradley, F.H., 312
Avicenna, 123 Brahe, Tycho, 147
axiology, 7 Brentano, Franz von, 356
Ayer, A.J., 326, 329 British philosophy, post-Kant, 227–295
Brunelleschi, 147
Bacon, Roger, 141–142 Bruno, Giordano, 152
434 ◆ Index
Buddha, pessimism of, 243 Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Buridan, John, 142 (Kierkegaard), 251, 253, 254
condensation, Anaximenes on, 23
calculus of felicity, Bentham on, Conjecture, Belief and, 64
284–285 consciousness
Callicles, 52–53 false, 269
Calvin, John, 147 Husserl on, 353–354
Candide (Voltaire), 186 phenomenology and, 367
canon, Christian, 107 reflected v. unreflected, 367
capitalism, Marx on, 264, 268 Sartre on, 366–367
Carnap, Rudolph, 326 consequentialism, 282
on language, 326–327 Consolations of Philosophy (Boethius),
on morality, 329 332
Cartesian philosophical arguments, 169 Constantine (Emperor of Rome), 108
categorical imperative, of Kant, contextual definition, Quine on, 347–348
219–222 contingency, 144
category mistakes, 340 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 147
catharsis, 87 correspondence theory, 303
Catholicism, Descartes on, 158–159 Cortés, Hernan, 146
causality cosmogony, 7
Hume on, 206–207 cosmological arguments, of Aquinas, 137
Schlick on, 327–328 cosmology, 7
censorship, 4–5 Course of General Linguistics
certainty, 314 (Saussure), 380
Cervantes, Miguel de, 20–21 creation, 19, 157
change, 6 Heraclitus on, 29–30
Heraclitus on, 30–31 Critias, 52–53
stability and, 29 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 219
Thales on, 13–14 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 211–212,
Charles the Bald, King, 115 217, 227
Charles the Sledgehammer, 122 cultural phenomena, 385–386
Chomsky, Noam, 353
Christianity, 31, 104, 276 da Vinci, Leonardo, 147
canon of, 107 Darwin, Charles, Dewey and, 307
dogma of, 107 Dasein, Heidegger on, 362
Neoplatonism and, 102, 151 Davidson, Donald, 353
origins of, 105–106 death
Plato and, 151 of Descartes, 172–173
in Roman Empire, 107–108 Epicurus on, 94
spread of, 106–107 Kierkegaard on, 252–254
stoicism and, 98–99 Nietzsche on, of god, 276–277
Cicero, 148 of Socrates, 58
the City, Plato on, 69–71 deconstruction, Derrida and, 397
Cixous, Hélèna, 398 deductions, Kant on, 213–214
coherence theory, 303 “Defence of Common Sense” (Moore),
Columbus, Christopher, 146 314, 316
common sense, Moore on, 314 deferred action, 309
Communist Manifesto (Marx), 267–268 Deleuze, Gilles, 398
complex ideas, simple ideas and, 189 demand, desire and, 390
concepts, 133 democracy, 44
conceptual analysis, defined, 7 Aristotle on, 84–85
conceptualism, of Abelard, Peter, 133 Mill on, 286
Index ◆ 435
Democritus, 41–44, 92, 94 on knowledge, 308–309
atomism of, 41–42 on utilitarianism, 310–311
on motion, 41–42 on values and facts, 310
Derrida, Jacques, 394–397 world defined by, 310
deconstruction and, 397 dialectics, 117
on dichotomies, 396–397 dialogues, Socratic, 56–58
on différance, 395 dictatorship of the proletariat, 269
on philosophical discourse, 394 différance, Derrida on, 395
on puns, 395 dignity, Kant on, 222
Saussure and, 394–395 doctrine of double truth, 124, 127
Descartes, René, 154–173, 250, 357 doctrine of the Trinity, 122
on Catholicism, 158–159 dogma, Christian, 107
death of, 172–173 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 20–21, 332
on dreams, 164 Donatello, 147
dualism of, 172 Donatism, 110
on Evil Genius, 169–170 dread, freedom and, 368
on God, 167–168 dreams, Descartes on, 164
on innate ideas, 166–167 dualism, 76, 180
Irigaray on, 400 Descartes on, 172
on mathematical certainty, 164–165 Hobbes on, 174
mathematical innovations of, 154–155
on optical illusions, 162–163 Eagleton, Terry, 396
philosophical problems of, 171 earth, sun and, 157–158
on pineal gland, 172 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 272
on radical doubt, 161–163 Eco, Umberto, 336
on senses, 162 Écrits (Lacan), 389
solipsism of, 165–166 efficient causes, 77, 139
Spinoza on, 178–179, 180 Einstein, Albert, 32, 325
on substance, 170, 171–172 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 249
system of knowledge of, 160–161 elements, 14, 19, 20
on thought, 165 Empedocles, 36–38
on Truth, 165 on evolution, 37–38
descriptions, Russell’s theory of, on Love and Strife, 37
323–324 empiricism, 35. See also sense data
desire of Berkeley, 196
demand and, 390 British, 154–223
Epicurus on, 92–93 defined, 188
language and, 389–390 of Hume, 203, 209–210
sex and, 93 on knowledge, 309
source of, 390–391 meaning and, 380
stoicism and, 97–98 Quine on, 344
destruction, Heraclitus on, 29–30 Encyclopediasts, 113–114
determinism. See also freedom Enneads (Plotinus), 151
of Lacan, 393–394 entropy, Anaximander and, 17
materialism and, 42 Ephesus, 27
soft, 174 Epictetus, 96, 99
deus ex machina, 40–41 Epicureanism, 91–95
Dewey, John, 306, 307–312 Epicurus, 91–92
Darwin and, 307–308 on death, 94
on evolution, 308–309 on desire, 92–93
Hegel’s influence on, 307 on pleasure, 94
on human development, 311–312 on repose, 93–94
436 ◆ Index
epistemology, 7–71, 63 Fodor, Jerry, 353
defined, 7 form, matter and, 74
epochê, 354, 355 formal causes, 77
Sartre on, 368 Forms, 68, 129
Erasmus, Desiderius, 149 Plato on, 66–67
Eriugena, John Scotus, 115–117, 126, 150 Foucault, Michel, 398
on God, 116–117 foundation, 265
on nature, 115–116, 117 Foundations of Arithmetic (Frege), 291
eschatological prophecy, 105 Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Essay Concerning Human Understanding Morals (Kant), 219
(Locke), 188–189 four roots, 37
Essays in Theodicy (Leibniz), 183 free will, 181–182
Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach), freedom, 97. See also determinism
260 dread and, 368
essences, Aristotle on, 76 Hegel on, 233–234
ethics, 63 values and, 372–373
Aquinas on, 138–139 Frege, Gottlob, 288–295, 316
defined, 7 analytic philosophy of, 288–289
of Kant, 222–223 on logic, 291
etymology, Heidegger on, 360 on meaning and mathematical
Euclid, 25 theories, 292–293
evolution on realism, 290
Dewey on, 308–309 Russell and, 292
Empedocles on, 37–38 on Sinn and Bedeutung, 294–295
ex nihilo nihil, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 94, 259, 396
existence on human self-importance, 158
Russell on, 321–322 Irigaray on, 399–400
thought and, 250 Lacan on, 389
“Existentialism is a Humanism” misogyny of, 399
(Sartre), 366 on Schopenhauer, 241
existentialism, of Kierkegaard, 247 From a Logical Point of View (Quine), 343
expediency, 49 functionalism, 383
experience Levi-Strauss on, 384
language and, 249
logical positivists on, 328 Galilei, Galileo, 147, 310
discoveries of, 155–157
facticity, Sartre on, 375 games, 339–340
faith Gaunilon, Anselm and, 120
Reason and, 126–127 Geist, 228
Sartre on, 377 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 271
fallenness, Heidegger on, 362 geocentricism, 157–158
false consciousness, 269 geometry, 25–26
family, Marx on, 262 Al-Ghazali, 123
feminism, 353 Giotto, 147
Feuerbach, Ludwig God
on God, 260 Anselm on, 118–119
Marx and, 261–262 Augustine on, 110–112
Fichte, Johan Gottlieb, 227 Berkeley on, 199–200
Ficino, Marsilio, 150 Descartes on, 167–168
final causes, 77, 139 Eriugena on, 116–117
fire, Heraclitus on, 28–29 Feuerbach on, 260
Florentine Academy, 150 Hegel on, 229–230
Index ◆ 437
God (continued) Heidegger, Martin, 357–365
Hobbes on, 193–194 on anxiety, 362–363
Hume on, 206 on Being, 357–358, 361–362
James, William, on, 301–302, on Dasein, 362
305–306 on etymology, 360
Leibniz on, 185 on existence, 405n43
Maimonides on, 125 on fallenness, 362
Nietzsche on, 276–277 on language, 359–360, 364
Spinoza on, 179–180 Nazi party and, 365
Goodman, Nelson, 353 neologisms of, 361
the Good, Plato on, 67–68 on poetry, 364–365
Gorgias, 50–51 on Socratic philosophers, 358–359
on rhetoric, 50–51 works of, 363–364
theses of, 50 Hellenistic philosophers, 91–102
Gospels, 105 Heraclitus, 27–31, 73
Greece, 2–9 on change, 30–31
culture of, 2, 4 on creation and destruction, 29–30
literature of, 5, 6 on fire, 28–29
origins of philosophy in, 3–4 interpretations of, 30–31
socioeconomic structure of, 5–6, 44 on Logos, 31
Guattari, Félix, 398 writing style of, 27–28
Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides), 125 history, Hegel on, 232
Hobbes, Thomas, 173–177, 281
habits, 308 on dualism, 174
Hacking, Ian, 353 on God, 193–194
happiness Locke and, 193–194
Aquinas on, 139 political philosophy of, 175–176
Aristotle on, 79–80, 82 psychological egoism of, 174–175
Bentham on, 282 social contract of, 177
Harvey, William, 147 on state of nature, 175–177
hedonism, 95. See also psychological Hölderlin, Friedrich, 364
egoism holism, of Quine, 346
Bentham on, 281–282 Homer, 5, 6
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Honorius III, Pope, 117
227–236, 257, 315, 378 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce),
absolute idealism of, 228 300
on being and nothingness, 230 human condition
on freedom, 233–234 Kierkegaard on, 252, 255–256
on God, 229–230 Marx on, 270
on history and progress, 232 humanism, 148
influence of, on British, 312 Aristotle and, 149–150
influence of, on Dewey, 307 Hume, David, 138, 144, 201–210, 325,
interpretations of, 258–259 327, 345
Kant and, 228 on causality, 206–207
Kierkegaard on, 247–248 empiricism of, 203, 209–210
Marx on, 258–259 on God, 206
on Napoleon, 235–236 on induction, 208–209
philosophical system of, 234–235 Kant and, 211–212
on philosophy, 236 method of philosophizing of, 205
on Reason, 232 on propositions, 201–202, 204–205
Schopenhauer and, 237 on rationalism, 210
on slavery, 232 on self, 209
438 ◆ Index
utilitarianism of, 280 pessimism of, 243
Hume’s fork, 209, 326, 329 teachings of, 105–106
Husserl, Edmund, 353–357 Jewish philosophies, 121–126
on consciousness, 353–354, of Maimonides, 124–126
356–357 John of Salisbury, 129
influence of, 357 John, Pope, 146
on phenomenological reduction, John, Saint, 107
354–355 John the Divine, 107
on space, 355–356 John the Irishman. See Eriugena, John
on time, 355 Scotus
Judaism, origins of, 104–105
idealism, 76 justice, 19, 51
absolute, 228
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Kant, Immanuel, 42–43, 121, 210–223,
Phenomenology (Husserl), 354 227, 325, 346
ideas, simple and complex, 189 on belief, 218–219
identity, 167 Bentham and, 282
ideology, 266 categorical imperative of, 219–222
Iliad (Homer), 5 on dignity, 222
the imaginary, Lacan on, 392 ethics of, 222–223
In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 149 Golden Rule and, 221–222
inanimate world, 39 Hegel and, 228
incorrigibility, 328 Hume and, 211–212
indeterminacy of translation thesis, of on intuition, 213
Quine, 350–352 irremovable goggles, 213–214
induction, Hume on, 208–209 James, William, and, 306
infinite seeds, of Anaxagoras, 38 on mathematical formulas, 214–215
innate ideas on metaphysics, 217
Descartes on, 166–167 on noumenal world, 216, 238
mathematical formulas and, 291 on phenomenal world, 217
Inquiry Concerning the Human on a priori truth, 212
Understanding (Hume), 201, 211 Schopenhauer and, 237
intuition, Kant on, 213 on synthetic a priori, 215
Irigaray, Luce, 398–402 on transcendental deductions, 213
on Descartes, 400 on understanding, 214
on Freud, 399–400 universalizability theory of, 226n31
on speculum, 400 Katz, Jerold, 353
on womanspeak, 401–402 Kepler, Johannes, 147, 170
irremovable goggles, Kant on, 213–214 Keynes, John Maynard, 315
Isidore, 114 Kierkegaard, Søren, 246–257, 368
Islam, 104 on Abraham, 257
philosophy of, 122 on death, 252–253
existentialism of, 247
James, Henry, 300 Hegel and, 247–248
James, William, 300–307 on human condition, 252, 255–256
background of, 300–301 on Knights of Faith, 255–256
on God, 301–302, 305–306 on language and experience, 249
Kant and, 306 on objective and subjective thought,
Peirce and, 300 251
pragmatism of, 301 on subjectivity, 255
Jesus of Nazareth on thought and existence, 250
Golden Rule of, 221–222 on truths, 251–253
Index ◆ 439
Knights of Faith, Kierkegaard on, propositions of, 225n12
255–256 Leucippus, 41–44
knowledge, 280 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 383–388
Berkeley on, 198–199 on cultural phenomena, 385–386
Descartes’ system of, 160–161 on functionalism, 384
Dewey on, 308–309 influence of, 388
empiricism and, 309 on logic, 386
Locke on, 189–190 on primitives, 386–387
Nietzsche on, 272–273 on structuralism, 383
rationalism and, 309 on universals, 384
Socrates on, 56 liberty, Mill on, 286
William of Ockham on, 142 linguistic turn, 317
Knowledge, opinion and, 65 Locke, John, 188–195, 345
Knox, John, 147 empiricism of, 188
Kristeva, Julia, 398 Hobbes and, 193–194
on knowledge, 189–190
Lacan, Jacques, 388–394 nominalism of, 190
determinism of, 393–394 Ockham’s razor and, 188–189
on Freud, 389 on political states, 195
on the imaginary, 392 on property, 194
on language and desire, 389–390 on qualities, 190–191
on poetry, 391–392 on revolution, 195
poststructuralism and, 388 on state of nature, 192–193
on the Real, 389 on substances, 191–192
on signifiers, 391 logic
on source of desire, 390–391 defined, 7
on the Symbolic, 392–393 Frege on, 291
laissez-faire Levi-Strauss on, 386
economic, 287 mathematical formulas and, 291
Mill on, 286 logical positivism, 317, 325–331. See
language also analytic philosophy
desire and, 389–390 on experience, 328
experience and, 249 on propositions, 330
Heidegger on, 359–360, 364 of Quine, 344
Nietzsche on, 273–274 Wittgenstein and, 333–334
over-determined, 396 Logos, 3, 19
phonic value and, 380 Cartesisan, 399–400
Saussure on, 382–383 defined, 2
semantic value and, 380 Heraclitus on, 31
uses of, 339 Love, Empedocles on, 37
Wittgenstein on, 337–340 Lucretius, 95
Language of Dementia (Irigaray), 401 Luther, Martin, 147
law, Aristotle on, 83–84 the Lyceum, 72
Leibniz, Gottfried, 182–188, 358, 369
on Cartesian metaphysics, 182–183 Mach, Ernst, 325
on God, 185 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 149
on monads, 187–188 Magellan, Ferdinand, 146
philosophical problems of, 188 Maimonides, Moses, 124–126
on principle of internal harmony, 185 on God, 125
on principle of sufficient reason, influence of, 126
184–185 Manicheanism, defined, 108
principles of, 183 Mann, Thomas, 246
440 ◆ Index
Marcus Aurelius, 96, 98 metonyms, 275, 390
Marx, Karl, 255, 258–270 Michelangelo, 147
on alienation, 263–264 Miletus, 13, 23–24
analytical model of, 265–266 Mill, John Stuart, 285–288, 346
on capitalism, 264, 268 on democracy, 286
on class, 267–268 on laissez-faire doctrine, 286
on dictatorship of the proletariat, on liberty, 288
269 on pleasure, 285
on division of labor, 269–270 mimesis, 86
on family, 262 Mimnermus, 6
Feuerbach and, 261–262 Mind. See Nous
on Hegel, 258–259 Mirandola, Gianfrancesco Pico della, 152
on human condition, 270 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della, 149
materialism of, 264–265 moderate realism, 133
on production, 263–264, 297n19 Monadology (Leibniz), 183
on religion, 262–263 monads, Leibniz on, 187–188
material causes, 77 monarchy, 84
materialism monism, 23, 35–36
determinism and, 42 Montaigne, Michel de, 149
of Marx, 264–265 Moore, George Edward, 313–317, 343
mathematical formulas, 24, 35 on common sense, 314
of Descartes, 154 McTaggart and, 313
Descartes on certainty of, 164–165 on meaning, 316
innate ideas and, 291 Russell and, 313–314, 318
Kant on, 214–215 morality, 71
logic and, 291 of Aristotle, 79
meaning and, 292–293 More, Thomas, 149
matter, form and, 74 motion, 73
maxims, 219 Democritus on, 41–42
McTaggart, J.E., 312, 313 Parmenides on, 32–33
Moore and, 313 Zeno on, 33–34
meaning Muhammed, 121–122
empiricism and, 380 music of the spheres, Pythagoras and,
mathematical theories and, 292–293 25–26
Moore on, 316 music, Schopenhauer on, 244–246
pragmatic theory of, 301–302 Muslim philosophies, 121–126
Quine on, 347 of Averroés, 123–124
rationalism and, 380 mysogyny, 399
Saussure on, 380 mysticism, 68
Wittgenstein on, 339 of Wittgenstein, 335
mechanistic conceptions, 143 Myth of the Cave, Plato on, 59–63
Meditations (Descartes), 160 Mythos, 19
influence of, 187 defined, 2
Mehta, Ved, 325 Myths
Meno (Plato), 68
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 357 naive realism, 171, 190–191
metaphors, 275 naming, Wittgenstein on, 336
metaphysics, 315 Napoleon, 288
Kant on, 217 Hegel on, 235–236
of Plato, 63 narcissism, 79
Russell on, 320–321 natural law, Aquinas on, 139–140
metempsychosis, defined, 151 natural phenomenon, 3
Index ◆ 441
naturalism, defined, 23 Knowledge and, 65
nature, 77–78 optical illusions, Descartes on, 162–163
Eriugena on, 115–116, 117 optimism, 6–7
Nausea (Sartre), 366 Oration on the Dignity of Man
necessary conditions, 64 (Mirandola), 149
necessity, 111–112 ordinary language philosophy, 331, 342,
Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, 353 349
Neoplatonism, 116 the overman, Nietzsche on, 276
Augustine and, 108–109
Christianity and, 102, 151 pantheism, 101
of Plotinus, 100–102 paradoxes, 33, 35
in Renaissance, 150 Parmenides, 31–33, 73
Neurath, Otto, 326 on Being, 32
New Testament, 107 influence of, 35–36
Newton, Isaac, 170, 182 on motion, 32–33
Nicholas of Austrecourt, 142 on nothingness, 31–32
Nicholas of Cusa, 151 patriarchal discourse, 399
Nicholas V, Pope, 148 Peano, Guiseppe, Russell and, 318–319
Nicomacheam Ethics (Aristotle), 79 Peirce, Charles
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 246, 255, 271–279 James, William, and, 300
on anthropomorphisms, 275–276 on pragmatism, 299
on death of God, 276–277 Pelagianism, 110
influence of, 279 perception, sense data and, 197
nominalism of, 273 pessimism, 6–7
on overman, 276 Nietzsche on, 278
on pessimism, 278 Sartre on, 378–379
philology of, 272 Schopenhauer on, 243
on reality and knowledge, 272–273 Petrarch, 148
on will to power, 273, 276 phallocentricism, 399
nihilism, of Sophists, 53 phenomenal world, Kant on, 217
nominalism, 129–130 phenomenological reduction, Husserl on,
Locke and, 190 354–355
of Nietzsche, 273 phenomenology, 353–379
of William of Ockham, 144 consciousness and, 367
nonsense, WIttgenstein on, 334–335 of Husserl, 353
Nothingness, Being and, 230, 370–371 Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel), 236,
noumenal world, Kant on, 216, 238 288
Nous, Anaxagoras on, 39–40 philology, of Nietzsche, 272
numerology, Pythagoras on, 24 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard),
251, 255
Ockham’s razor, 142–143 Philosophical Investigations
Locke and, 188–189 (Wittgenstein), 335–336, 348
Russell and, 320 phonic value, 380
On Liberty (MIll), 286 physicalism, of Quine, 348–349
On the Divisions of Nature (Eriugena), Plato, 59–71, 320
115, 117 Aristotle and, 72–75, 129
On the Unity of Intellect against the on art, 85–86
Averroists (Aquinas), 124 Christianity and, 151
onomatopoeia, 381 on City, 69–71
ontological argument, 118, 121, 168 on Forms, 66–67
ontology, 7, 63, 70, 85–86 on Good, 67–68
Opinion, 64 influence of, 71
442 ◆ Index
metaphysics of, 63 Leibniz on, 184–185
Myth of the Cave of, 59–63 principle of the excluded middle, 247
Saussure on, 382 Principles of Human Knowledge
on Truth, 68–69 (Berkeley), 196
Platonic realists, 129 Priscillianism, 110
Platonism, 100, 276 Proclus, 150
pleasure, 52 production, Marx on, 263–264, 297n19
Bentham on, 282–283 proper names, analysis of, 294
Epicurus on, 94 property, Locke on, 194
Mill on, 285 propositions
Plotinus, 117, 150 analytic, 183, 212
Neoplatonism of, 100–102 Hume on, 201–202, 204–205
pluralism, 38 of Leibniz, 225
defined, 36 logical positivists on, 330
poetry synthetic, 183–184, 203, 212
Heidegger on, 364–365 Protagoras, on relativism, 49–50
Lacan on, 391–392 Protagorus, 49–50
Poincaré, Jules, 325 protocol sentences, 328
political power, 44 the Pseudo-Dionysius, 115, 150
Hobbes on, 175–176 psychoanalysis, 388
Locke on, 195 psychological atomism, 196. See also
political theory sense data
of Aristotle, 83 psychological egoism. See also hedonism
in Renaissance, 147 of Hobbes, 174–175
polity, 84 psychologism, 293
Polytheism, 104 puns, Derrida on, 395
Porphyry, on genera and species, 128 Pure Being, 229
Poststructuralism, 380–402 Putnam, Hilary, 353
Lacan and, 388 Pythagoras, 24–27
power, 52 influence of, 26
Pragmatism, 299–312 on music of the spheres, 25–26
coherence and correspondence on numerology, 24–25
theories and, 303–304
of James, William, 301 qualities, primary and secondary,
meaning and, 301–302 190–191, 197
truth and, 302–303 quantum mechanics, 346
Pragmatism (James), 301 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 343–353
pre-oedipal relations, 401 on analytic-synthetic distinction,
Pre-Socratic philosophers, 10–47 345
history of, 11 background of, 343
influence of, 42–44 on contextual definition, 347–348
Prime Mover, 135 on empiricism, 344
Aristotle on, 78 holism of, 346
primitives, Levi-Strauss on, 386–387 indeterminacy of translation thesis
The Prince (Machiavelli), 149 of, 350–352
Principia Mathematica (Russell and on meaning, 347
Whitehead), 319, 325 physicalism of, 348–349
principle of identity, 183, 247 on reductionism, 344–345
principle of internal harmony, 183, 185
principle of noncontradiction, 183–184, radical doubt, Descartes on, 161–163
247 randomness, 181
principle of sufficient reason, 183, 184 Raphael, 147
Index ◆ 443
rarefaction, Anaximenes on, 23 Ryle, Gilbert, 340
rationalism, 35
continental, 154–223 Samos, 27
Hume on, 210 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 357, 366–379
on knowledge, 309 on Being, 369–370
meaning and, 380 on consciousness, 366–367
reading, 197–198 on epochê, 368
realism, Frege on, 290 on facticity, 375
the Real, Lacan on, 389 on faith, 377
Reason, 31 on freedom, 368, 374–375
faith and, 126–127 on nothingness, 370–371
Hegel on, 232 on pessimism, 378–379
principle of sufficient, 183, 184 on situation, 375–376
reductio ad absurdum, Zeno and, 33 on suicide, 377
reductionism, 349 on values, 372–373
Quine on, 344–345 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 380–383
Thales and, 15 Derrida and, 394–395
Reichenbach, Hans, 326 on language, 382–383
reification, 274 on meaning, 380
relativism. See also subjectivism on Plato, 382
Protagoras on, 49–50 on semiology, 383
religion on signs, 381
Marx on, 262–263 Savage Mind (Levi-Strauss), 386
science and, 159 Schlick, Moritz, 325
Renaissance philosophy, 104–153 on causality, 327–328
repose, Epicurus on, 93–94 Schofield, Malcolm, on Anaximander, 20
representative realism, 190–191 scholasticism, of Aquinas, 141
Berkeley on, 200 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 237–246
Republic (Plato), 59–60, 63 Freud on, 241
social philosophy in, 69 Hegel and, 237
revolution, Locke on, 195 on intuitive experiences, 238–239
rhetoric, Gorgias and, 50–51 Kant and, 237
Ring, Merrill, 20 on music, 244–246
Roman Empire, 113 on pessimism, 243
bureaucracy of, 92 on sublimation, 242
Christianity in, 107 on suicide, 243–244
Rorty, Richard, 398 on truth, 239–240
Roscelin, 129 on will, 239–240, 241–242
Royce, Josiah, 312 science
Russell, Bertrand, 178, 290, 317, 332, Dewey on, 310
335, 343 religion and, 159
on existence, 321–322 in Renaissance, 147
Frege and, 292 Russell on, 319
on Leibniz, 182 Scotus, John Duns, 141
on metaphysics, 320–321 Searle, John, 353
Moore and, 318 self
on Ockham’s razor, 320 Hume on, 209
Peano and, 318–319 in reflected consciousness, 367
on science, 319 thought and, 250
social criticism of, 324–325 selfhood, 166–167
theory of descriptions of, 323–324, self-importance, Freud on, 158
347 Sellars, Wilfrid, 353
444 ◆ Index
semantic value, 380 Spenser, Edmund, 20
semiology, Saussure on, 383 Spinoza, Baruch, 177–182, 369
Seneca, 95, 98, 148 on Descartes, 178–179, 180
sense data, 213. See also empiricism; on God, 179–180
psychological atomism lifestyle of, 178
Descartes on, 166 on substance, 179
perception and, 197 stability, 73
senses, Descartes on, 162 change and, 29
set theory, 292 state of nature
sex, desire and, 93 Hobbes on, 175–177
Siger of Brabant, 124 Locke on, 192–193
signifieds, Saussure on, 381 stoicism, 95–99
signifiers Christianity and, 98–99
Lacan on, 391 desire and, 97–98
Saussure on, 381 suicide and, 98
signs Strife, Empedocles on, 37
arbitrariness of, 381 Structuralism, 380–402
Saussure on, 381 structuralism, Levi-Strauss on, 383
the silence, 334 subjectivism, 49, 255. See also
Simile of the Line, 63, 67, 71, 89n5, relativism
100 of Sophists, 53
Simonides, 6 sublimation, Schopenhauer on, 242
simple ideas, complex ideas and, 189 substance, 167, 187
Sinn, Frege on, 295–296 Aristotle on, 75–76
situation, Sartre on, 375–376 Berkeley on, 198
skepticism, of Sophists, 53 Descartes on, 170, 171–172
slavery Locke on, 191–192
Aristotle on, 85 Spinoza on, 179
Hegel on, 232 sufficient conditions, 64
social contract, of Hobbes, 177 suicide
social philosophy, in Republic, 69 Sartre on, 377
Socrates, 54–58 Schopenhauer on, 243–244
on Anaxagoras, 40–41 stoicism and, 98
death of, 58 Summa contra gentiles (Aquinas), 132
dialogues of, 56–58 Summa theological (Aquinas), 132, 136
on knowledge, 56 sun, earth and, 157–158
philosophy prior to, 10–47 superstructure, 265
on truth, 57–58 the Symbolic, Lacan on, 392–393
solipsism, of Descartes, 165–166
sophism, 49 tabula rasa, 189
Sophists, 48–53 tautologies, 203
nihilism of, 53 teleological systems, 138–139
skepticism of, 53 defined, 77
subjectivism of, 53 tender-minded, 306
soul Tertullian, 126–127
Aquinas on, 135 Thales, 13–16
Aristotle on, 135 on change, 13–13
space reductionism of, 15
Husserl on, 355–356 on water, 14–15
Kant on, 213 Theatetus (Plato), 54, 324
Speculum of the Other Woman theology
(Irigaray), 400 natural v. revealed, 134
Index ◆ 445
theology (continued) values
philosophy v., 133–134 Dewey on, 310
of William of Ockham, 144–145 freedom and, 372–373
“Theory of Descriptions” (Russell), 320 Sartre on, 372–373
“This Sex Which is Not One” (Irigaray), The Venerable Bede, 114
401 Verrocchio, 147
thought vias affirmativa and negativa, 116
Descartes on, 165 Vienna Circle, 326, 327
existence and, 250 virtue, 80
objective v. subjective, 251 Aristotle on, 81–82
self and, 250 Voltaire, 186
Thrasymachus, 51 von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 227
272 von Wolff, Christian, 211
time
Husserl on, 355 water, 14–15
Kant on, 213 Whitehead, Alfred North, 71, 319, 343
tough-minded, 306 will, Schopenhauer on, 239–240,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 241–242
(Wittgenstein), 330–331, 331, will to power, Nietzsche on, 273, 276
332, 335, 336, 341 William of Ockham, 129, 142–146. See
Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre), 366 also Ockham’s razor
Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 201 heresy of, 145–146
Treatise on Logic (Maimonides), 124–125 on knowledge, 142
Trismegistus, Hermes, 151 nominalism of, 144
Truth theology of, 144–145
coherence theory of, 303 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 290, 317, 324,
correspondence theory of, 303 325, 331–343, 348, 382
Descartes on, 165 background of, 331–332
doctrine of double, 124, 127 on language, 337–340
Kant on a priori, 212 on meaning, 339
Kierkegaard on, 251–253 mysticism of, 335
Plato on, 68–69 on naming, 336
pragmatic theory of, 302–303 on nonsense, 334–335
a priori, 212 on ordinary language philosophy, 342
Schopenhauer on, 239–240 positivists and, 333–334
Socrates on, 57–58 on simplest constituents of reality,
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine), 341
344 womanspeak, Irigaray on, 401–402
Two Treatises on Government (Locke), Word and Object (Quine), 343
192–193 World as Will and Idea (Schopenhauer),
237
understanding, Kant on, 214 Wycliffe, Jonathan, 147
universals
Levi-Strauss on, 384–385 Zeno, 33–36, 95
problems of, 127–130 influence of, 35–36
universes, Anaximander on, 20 on motion, 33–34
utilitarianism, 280 reductio ad absurdum and, 33
Dewey on, 310–311
446 ◆ Index

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Looking at Philosophy:

The Unbearable Heaviness of

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editor in Chief: Emily Barrosse Manuscript Editor: Karen Dorman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wittgenstein once said that a whole philosophy book could be written

I. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

II. The Athenian Period

IV. Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

VI. Post-Kantian British

VII. Pragmatism, the Analytic Tradition,

Glossary of Philosophical Terms 407

228 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

But remember, in the unusual system being suggested here,

230 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

232 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

freedom. There is the stage at which we believe we can be free only by

The Owl of Minerva

236 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

Schopenhauer, in fact, showed deep respect for only two West-

Now, when Kant turned to the noumenal world, he claimed that

238 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

It’s Not Nice to Giggle at Funerals

pleasure with a forbidden partner. These and similar human experi-

Schopenhauer’s awful truth amounts to this: Behind appear-

240 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

242 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

Chat Chat Chat

What Seems to Be What Is the Case

is, in fact, counternature and therefore antiwill. This autonomy from

246 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

What Kierkegaard writes is not really the sum and substance of

250 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

252 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

The Individual before the Yawning Abyss of Eternity

254 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

These knights have grasped the absurdity and contingency of all

256 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

actions, thereby becoming a Kierkegaardian hero. Kierkegaard wrote

Hegel’s Spirit Reigns Supreme

258 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

260 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

This is the heavenly family.

This is the earthly family.

Marx fell directly under Feuerbach’s inﬂuence. As a young phi-

262 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

264 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

such social features as art, religion, morality, poetry, and philosophy.

In this and similar passages, Marx made the relationship be-

266 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

268 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

270 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

272 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

274 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

276 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

It is easy enough to criticize Nietzsche for his inconsistency and

278 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

280 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

John Stuart Mill with the

282 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

284 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

286 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

288 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

290 ◆ Chapter 6 Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy